It’s a Friday evening in southern Mozambique not far from the border with South Africa. Four of us are hunkered down in what is known as the star pit, a protected spot near the top of a tall sand dune at Nkumbe Eco Wildlife Estate near the seaside village of Ponta Malongane with its al fresco eateries, small bustling market and brightly painted roadside bars.

We’re sipping chilled Casal Garcia, a vinho verde (a slightly bubbly young “green” wine) — from Portugal — and peering heaven-ward, each trying to be the first to spot the international space station that’s supposed to be passing overhead anytime now.

Far from any foreign light source, could there be any better observation location on this crisp, clear, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds night — no LSD needed?

“You see, there’s the Southern Cross; it’s pointers. And the Milky Way. And there’s the Magellanic Clouds. And Sagittarius, the archer.”

Graham, who’s property we’re on, is impressing us with his Southern Hemisphere night-sky knowledge. We can hear the Indian Ocean surging a couple of hundred yards away as the crow flies. Also, a dull thump, thump, thump — bass-too-high music from the three-day beachfront trance fest that’s brought in hordes of what could be a San Francisco Haight Ashbury or Berkeley Telegraph Avenue spacey tie-die crowd.

Mozambique, with its more than 1,500 miles of coastline threaded with sandy beaches — home to many rural fishing communities as well as resorts specializing in diving and water sports — is one of Africa’s up-and-coming hotspots and recent success stories.

Culinary Travel Mozambique

What does Mozambique offer the culinary traveller? “Great seafood and a very unique fusion of Portuguese and African cuisine that is genuinely Mozambican. Eat camarão grelhado (grilled peri-peri prawns) wherever you can find them. Wash them down with an espresso, Portuguese wine — or again, chilled Laurentina (beer),” says John Aritho, who has lived and worked in Mozambique and escapes there any chance he has.

For the culinary traveler into the café lifestyle, particularly those who relish seafood, and who want an African adventure that offers sea and sunshine, pristine island adventures, plus miles of idyllic sun-drenched mainland beaches for fishing, diving, kiting, kayaking and lazing in the sunshine plus the potential for excellent game viewing thrown in for good measure — the Gorongosa National Park is one of the wildest national parks in Africa and not too far north of Ponta Malongane is the Maputo Elephant Reserve — Mozambique is difficult to beat.

Oh, and did I mention the city sophistication and interesting history?

Moz Then and Now

After gaining independence from Portugal in 1975, Mozambique descended into civil war and for some years had the ignominious distinction of being ranked the poorest country in the world.

The cease-fire was signed in 1992. By 1993 its transformation had begun — boosted more recently with the discovery of vast reserves of natural gas off the coast, seen by some as a mixed blessing.

Back to 1993, soon the markets were sprouting, the marimba music was playing through the nights, international aid organizations were making their mark and foreign business interests were targeting opportunities alongside locals.

In colonial times, the capital Maputo, then Lourenço Marques, was strongly European in flavor and flair.

After falling into a depressing state of disrepair, Maputo now more thriving a city than it ever was with a jumble of cranes paying testimony to development, new hotels, shops selling international fashion brands and even the return of many Portuguese. (Portuguese is the official language.)

Spend two nights there and explore the beachfront. If you want to splurge in a gracious setting book into the legendary Polana Hotel. As with most of Mozambique including the islands, the range spans high-end to B&Bs to backpacker lodges so you have options.

In Maputo, seek out the famous seafood market. Let them prepare you a meal while you sip a cold Laurentina (beer). Pay a visit to the Costa do Sol, a restaurant/hotel famous for it’s seafood and with a rich history and a great view.

Note: When in Maputo stroll Avenida Julius Nyerere for cafes and restaurants selling peri-peri chicken and seafood, spicy Thai, Indian cuisine, seafood restaurants, coffee shops, pizzerias, ice cream and pastry shops. Maputo is more of an after-dark than a daytime city for vacationers. Try Gil Vicente (Avenida Samora Machel) on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and Nucleo de Arte (Rua da Argelia) on Sundays. Other bars host live bands on the weekends.

She was married for 10 years and had two children with Machel, who led the country from independence until his untimely death in 1986 when his presidential plane crashed at night in mountainous terrain where the borders of Mozambique, Swaziland and South Africa converge. Official investigations blamed the Russian crew and pilot error but speculation continues that the accident was orchestrated by the then-apartheid government of South Africa.

The international advocate for women’s and children’s rights and Mandela were married in July 1998 on his 80th birthday. In July 2007 she, along with her husband and Archbishop Desmond Tutu convened The Elders, a group of “independent global leaders — elder statesmen — working together for peace and human rights.”

The Moz Lifestyle Back to Mozambique as vacation destination; its lifestyle appeal.

When I think of Mozambique, I think of fresh prawns bought from the market, camping holidays (it’s still ideal for this and has the whole range of accommodation from five-star luxury to backpackers lodges), eating buckets of cashew nuts, arriving on a ship that dropped anchor off Santa Carolina Island — known as Paradise Island — and being taken ashore on rubber duckies to explore; then there’s the beach resort living, colorful markets, friendly people, swimming and surfing lessons — and on my most recent trip we wandered among the zebra and star-gazed, as I say, from a sand dune in a wildlife estate.

Graham, our stargazing guru, has restocked this 620 acres of coastal forests and dunes with many of the animals that once roamed freely here but that had been lost to poaching during the civil war. The health of this eco estate and the number of nyala, reedbuck, impala and zebra we see on our game viewing drive are in an obtuse way, a micro reflection of the country’s transformation.

Down south, where we are, there’s the option of diving with dolphins and whales, kiting, doing beach walks and eating at a plethora of casual eateries at the beach resort village of Ponta d’Ouro.

Travel north from Maputo for many that are more spectacular. The town of Vilanculos, gateway to the Bazaruto Archipelago, Africa’s biggest marine reserve, which gives you five island destinations to choose from, including Bazaruto island with its luxury lodges favored by many Moz fans.

And for miles of palm-lined beaches and fun times, it’s worth checking out Inhambane and the holiday resort town of Tofo, known as the whale-shark mecca of the world; the Barra Peninsula for excellent manta ray sightings and for swimming with whale sharks.

If variety is the spice of life, the good news is: the growing number of African immigrants to the U.S. is changing the way we eat. By way of diversity and numbers, "out of Africa" restaurants are growing just as fast as Jack's beanstalk.

Meanwhile, the origins of soul food as a cuisine go back millennia, to pre-colonial Africa. Crops brought directly from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade include rice, okra, tania, black eyed peas and kidney and lima beans. Want an eye-opening read? Check out the contribution of enslaved Africans to agriculture.

While the distinctive delights of Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisine (essentially the same eating experience) are now pretty much mainstream in the U.S. in terms of restaurant options nationally, countries like Liberia and Ghana — places one perhaps hadn't thought about in terms of food — are moving in. In the first place, eateries are opened to create a home-from-home for immigrant brothers and sisters. Beyond that, they become new dining possibilities offering exposure to new flavors, cultural roots and traditions for anyone with an interest in the African continent and food.

Massachusetts musician, foodie and media maven, Kenneth Yarbrough, who works with the City of Boston as chief communications officer for Councillor Charles Yancey, started his website African Dinner — the most comprehensive source of African restaurants in the U.S. (also Canada and England) I could find online — in 2011.

"I started the site (he gives listings and does reviews) due to my knowledge of healthy eating, my enjoyment of African cuisine — and my concern for promoting African restaurants.

"I was fortunate to have a roommate, Izetta, from Liberia, West Africa, while I was completing my undergraduate degree at the University of Massachusetts/Boston in the 1990s. For two years, I devoured spectacular Liberian cuisine on a daily basis. It was heaven! Various dishes — stewed over garlic, onions, peppers, tomatoes and habanero peppers and sautéed in olive oil — included okra, eggplant, watercress, butternut squash, mustard and collard greens, as well as chicken or smoked fish. The dishes were healthy, spicy, and delicious."

An exciting part of visiting African restaurants, he says, is learning about their owners. "For instance, Sabina Jules, founder of Motherland Kitchen & Spices in Marietta, Georgia, served as a successful IT executive before becoming a restaurateur. Samad Naamad, owner and executive chef of Tangierino Restaurant in Charlestown, Massachusetts, is an actor and filmmaker. Ernest Harmon, co-owner and manager of Zoewee's Restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina, operated Zoewee's in Liberia, West Africa, before it was obliterated during Liberia's 11-year civil war."

Besides the "travel through Africa via your own backyard" experience of eating globally locally, Yarbrough believes "African cuisine is the solution to reducing the prevalence of poor health conditions in African-American communities. Personally, my weight fell from 187 pounds to 142 pounds in 12 months without fasting or additional exercising while I was eating Liberian cuisine on a daily basis."

He was also inspired to eat and promote authentic African cuisine by personal experience. After a good friend died of cancer, he found a book on her shelves about the low rates of cancer in African nations where food is less processed.

"After reading the entire book, I began to understand circumstances that may have instigated Barbara's death (and the deaths of many others). Barbara and I had often consumed typical American junk foods loaded with calories, potassium, preservatives, saturated fats and artificial ingredients." That has been extra motivational on his African food journey.

When you start researching online, you'll see there are as many cuisine subtleties as there are regions and tribes in Africa. For starters, join me on a little taste journey through a sampler portion of eight of them.

Eight Africa Countries = Eight Unique Culinary Styles

1. Cameroon

I want to go to Cameroon to eat. I have read many times that Cameroonian cuisine is one of the most varied in Africa due to its location on the crossroads between the north, west, and centre of the continent; added to this is the profound influence of French food, a legacy of the colonial era. See more on Cameroonian food and specialities on Wikipedia.

And see a simple recipe for ndolé, the national dish. It's a stew with nuts, fish or beef and ndoleh, bitter leaves indigenous to West Africa.

2. Côte d'Ivoire

I have a very fond memory, and a photograph illustrating a travel article to prove it, of sitting at a table groaning with food at a beach near Abidjan in the Côte d'Ivoire. There were French flavors (former French colony) and some Greek specialties (my friend I joined there was Greek) and assorted traditional local fare (keep reading). In the background are two women with carrying tin basins.

One basin is filled with bunches of bananas; the other with pineapples. I remember being presented with something I later learned was sheep's testicles in a restaurant cum nightclub with belly dancers. I have fonder memories of picking succulent grilled fish flesh off bones. Call me chicken (yes, I ate some good chicken dishes there) when I confess I am happy I was not subjected to what I read is an Ivorian speclialty as in huge land snails "which are very appreciated, commonly grilled or eaten in sauce."

The traditional cuisine of Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) is based on tubers, grains, chicken, seafood, fresh fruit, veggies and spices. Slow-simmered stews are a staple. Kedjenou is a type of spicy stew consisting of chicken and vegetables slow-cooked in a sealed pottery vessel known as a canary. The country is one of the largest cocoa producers in the world — not always happily. (See Chocoholics Unite: Know This About Chocolate.)

As with any culture, food is central to Ghanaian life — world wide. Chop bars (casual eateries) can be found on every corner of Ghana's towns and in some major cities Ghanaians live, including London and New York.

I haven't been to Ghana but researching what's cooking there, I recommend the following links:

This has been one of my best U.S. culinary discoveries. The subtle spices, the exotic stews both for the carnivore (I'm hooked on kitfo, their version of steak tartare, which is not strictly a stew given that that the minced beef is served raw, but infused with its unique Ethiopian spicings and served at room temp, to me it qualifies) and also for the vegetarian (the grains and pulses cooked to flavor-perfection); the bubbly porous injera "bread" — and eating with my hands, sharing the meal with friends (because like many out-of-Africa meals, it's made to share).

That Ethiopian cuisine should be such a treat came as a surprise when I arrived in California from South Africa. I was one of the many children (is it generational?) brought up to the "eat everything on your plate — think of the starving children in Ethiopia" mantra.

If you research African cuisine, you see Ethiopian is now ubiquitous throughout the US (along with Moroccan food — different, equally delicious — to me more Middle Eastern, somehow, than African). In sheer number-of-restaurants, Ethiopian is now "mainstream."

Spice is the life of Ethiopian cuisine. The flavorful aromatic dishes can be simple to make if you have the correct medley of essential herbs and spices prepared in the right way, says Fetlework Tefferi, chef-owner of Oakland's Café Colucci restaurant and author of Ethiopian Pepper & Spice, a cookbook inspired, Tefferi says, by a desire to document and preserve authentic flavors remembered from her childhood.

"I wanted to document the cuisine, where it comes from and how it is sourced," she says.

"To do this I knew I had to focus on the spices and the blending."

Once the essential nature of the spice blend has been preserved, Tefferi says, there can be fusion and a lot of California chefs are infusing Ethiopian spices into their vegetarian dishes. "They can be used to enhance and give a new twist — in fact, even to the barbecue." In other words, authentic African-American culinary fusion in action!

I had the toughest chicken I ever tried to bite into at a roadside eatery in Kenya.

But also some very tasty nyama choma (grilled meat – usually goat or sheep) cooked over an open fire at a roadside stop. And, not surprisingly, five-star luxury cuisine at Governor's Camp in the Masai Mara game reserve. Plus a never-to-be-forgotten breakfast with bacon, eggs and bubbly: a table set in the middle of a great Masai Mara plain, encircled way in the distance by game, dropped off there by a hot air balloon.

I'd thought of Liberia in terms of war, bloodshed, a flag of convenience for ships, US colonization, freed slaves — but never in terms of cuisine until recently. Now I learn that traditional food includes the grains, fruits, veggies and spicy stews typical to West Africa. There is a tradition of baking imported from the US. And in the capital, Monrovia, very good restaurants serve Mediterranean, Italian, French and American specialties.

Oaklander Kamala Leslie, who paid her first trip to Senegal last month, gives some first-hand memories of some of her dining experiences:

"Meals are served and eaten family style. You take your shoes off and sit on the floor around the big platter. People eat with their right hand or a fork and spoon. Rice and root veggies are common in all the dishes. The fish or protein (fish, chicken, lamb, goat — no pork as it's a Muslim country) is always served in the middle of the family-style platter.

"The national dish is thieboudienne, which means rice and fish though people say "fish and rice."

A famous meal-like dessert she enjoyed was lakh. "Yogurt with couscous, I believe. They poured condensed milk onto the couscous halfway through the meal. That was amazing."

Go to the menu section on the San Francisco's Bissap Baobab website for examples of popular Senegalese dishes.

Siba Mtongana has been around the world via her palate. “One of the great things about food is that it can take you to all these different countries without you ever actually going there.

“I love South-East-Asian cooking, for example. The bold yet mellow flavors. The imperfect harmony that blends the sweet, the salty, the sour, and the dash of chili — and that it’s healthy, light and quick. Those are some of my core values when it comes to cooking.

“And I love Indian. We have a huge Indian pop in South Africa. At home, growing up, my mom used curry spices; Indian spices. It’s normal for me to use a mild curry powder in my cooking — so normal, I forget its Indian.

“And I love North African flavors, like Moroccan cooking; their spices and paste and the preserved lemon. And I love the Italian way of cooking.

“And Mexican food. We went to a Mexican restaurant in Cape Town yesterday.

“And we went to Portugal when I was launching Siba’s Table and it was amazing. I guess you can tell I just love food and I love cooking! I eat the different foods from the different countries and am inspired to them to create my one interpretations.”

Cape Town-based Siba Mtongana is the host of Siba’s Table. It debuted in South Africa on the Food Network channel in September 2013 and was an instant hit. It is now broadcast in over 90 countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa and the first season is currently being beamed to more than 60 million households via the Cooking Channel in the United States.

For the ebullient, super-friendly, creative, down-to-earth celebrity chef — wife of Brian Mtongana, a below-the-line advertising executive, mom of Lonwabo, 2, (both have featured in her show) and another baby is due next month — her meteoric rise to stardom has been more than a dream come true.

It’s not something she planned. “At one point when I was young I wanted to be a doctor. Then a teacher, because my mom was a teacher. Then when I was about 10 I wanted to be the first black woman president — it was the early 1990s and Nelson Mandela had been released from jail and was coming into power and I loved him. And then I wanted to be a lawyer.

“Then I started seeing programs on TV with these British celebrity chefs. First there was Delia Smith, who was very prim and proper and taught you how to make things like souffles. Then Jamie (Oliver) came along, who I loved so much. And then Nigella, who showed you the kitchen could be glamourous, and then Ina Garten, and many others.

“I thought I wanted to do something food-related but at school, career guidance pushed for main-stream things like IT, the medical profession and engineer. My mom said cooking was a hobby and I should get a proper education to fall back on; do a proper course.

“But my big sister helped me by doing research into courses that offered something food-related. She found me the course I eventually decided to take — a Food and Consumer Sciences degree that was like a bridge between cheffing, nutrition and media studies. My sister said, this is you! Plus it gives you options. It sounded scientific to my mom, so she agreed.”

In her first year Mtongana got a job at a deli in Cape Town to start getting hands-on experience. Then at her college she was offered a job tutoring Xhosa students (“I’m Xhosa-speaking by birth. It’s my tribe and Nelson Mandela’s tribe — same roots,” she says, peeling into laughter; at the presumption of linking herself with him, is how it sounds) who were battling to keep up in English, especially with the food terminology.

At some point when she said she was feeling a little bored, one of her lecturers recommended her to Drum — an iconic South African black magazine — to be trained as food editor.

She spent five years at Drum. And here she brings in a story that tells you a lot about who Siba is and what makes her tick.

Secret of Success

“I’ve always followed my heart in terms of doing what feels right to me. That has somehow landed me in the right path,” she says when I ask her to share the secret of her success.

“We’re born-again Christians in my family and will I pray about something, and if I have peace with something, I do it, and if I don’t have peace with it, I don’t do it.

“My father, when I was leaving home, reminded me and my siblings that all of us children had opportunities he and my mom never had. I come from a big family; we are six, I am the last-born and have three big sisters.

“My father said, never be afraid to work hard. He told me that I should work for somebody and work like a slave for five years. He said I should not care what other people thought or said about this. He said ‘work hard and take all that you can learn. You’re preparing yourself for your own empire. When you’ve learned, then you build your own thing.’”

She says many people gave her advice. “But that really stuck with me. I stayed with Drum for nearly five yeas. I can’t say it was a conscious decision based on what my dad said, but I did work hard. And if you work very hard, the right people pay attention.” Spiritually her mantra is: “I do my best, and God does the rest.”

A Mother’s Influence

Her love of cooking and food, she says, came from her mom. “We had a small garden and then another bigger one outside our yard that my dad tended for my mom. She’d send us to get French herbs, all sorts of veggies, blackberries from the tree. We were living in East London.

“My mom was not like an elaborate cook, but she did everything. Pasta, pap or umphokoqo — crumbled maize meal (a form of grits). The ratio between the water and the maize meal is critical. Too much it doesn’t crumble and is more like porridge.

“My mom was a free-style cook. If you asked her, for instance, how much salt to put in, she’d say ‘just feel it with your hands.’

“That didn’t make sense, I thought. But whenever she felt I was asking too many questions, she’d say, ‘You will get the hang of it when you’re older.’ And she was right. The more you cook, the more you learn about it.”

Siba hasn’t traveled extensively — yet! “I’ve been to Zambia; and Kenya was wonderful. I’ve been to London, Dubai, Belgian and Portugal.

“I haven’t been to the US. But a tour is being planned.”

Are there any reasons she think travel is a good idea?

“Absolutely,” she says. “Travel opens your mind to things you’ve never thought of before. For instance, I had a new level or respect for Belgian waffles when I tasted them there. But the reasons go way beyond food. Travel makes you step right out of the box.”

And cooking? Why should people cook?

“I can’t imagine anyone not cooking. Cooking is an amazing thing. It binds you together as a family. I have good memories of my grandmother’s cooking that will last me a lifetime.”

She also believes in social responsibility and sharing with others. “I’d love to work with a big organization like the UN where I could help in the food and nutrition sphere. I think giving back is the core of what my mother instilled in us. It’s the spirt of ubuntu. If you’re given a big platform, you must do good beyond yourself.

Into the Future

“So in the future I want to have a foundation for young kids where education and nutrition are key. I’m till refining and clarifying the idea.”

“I’ll be launching two dishes; a main dish of lamb chops stuffed with pesto and extra pine nuts and a salmon salad with very nice elements and a dressing. And people are always asking me how to make the perfect mash, so I will show them how.”

]]>wanda@cuisinenoirmag.com (Wanda Hennig)Delicious LifeTue, 18 Oct 2016 14:13:53 -0700Cheers to South Africa’s Most Eccentric Hotel and Ancestral Home of the Zulu Blonde: The George Hotelhttp://www.cuisinenoirmag.com/delicious-life/cheers-to-south-africa-s-most-eccentric-hotel-ancestral-and-home-of-the-zulu-blonde-the-george-hotel
http://www.cuisinenoirmag.com/delicious-life/cheers-to-south-africa-s-most-eccentric-hotel-ancestral-and-home-of-the-zulu-blonde-the-george-hotel

How The George Hotel got its name depends on who you ask. One person, when I recently stopped in Eshowe to check out what has become a landmark in this Zululand town a little more than an hour by road north of Durban — and not just for arty folks and beer drinkers; the ANC had booked out the place for a convention the day I arrive — tells me “George” was the Norwegian who bequeathed the whale harpoon gun that stands on the lawn out front.

This was quickly discredited by a less romantic tale that now eludes me. Needless to say, the hotel was not named for King George V, as I had suspected, given that his historic visage graces the hotel’s bathroom signs.

The name might be open to interpretation.

What is not, however, is that The George earns its “most eccentric” tag thanks to a happy collaboration over the past four years or so between Richard Chennells, owner, who is upgrading The George to make it an upscale “destination” establishment and Peter Engblom, one of KwaZulu-Natal’s best-known creatives. Engblom, who can point out the junior school he went to just down the street, also happens to be a walking Wikipedia equivalent on the tree-filled, spread-out rural town — and on Zululand as a whole.

Chennells is doing the structural work and big-picture visioning. Engblom, meanwhile, has been given virtual free reign to use the hotel as a large hanging space. A permanent exhibition. A place to play and create and enhance. He has work-live quarters there and a studio space.

But the real studio is the hotel. The bedrooms. The bar. The corridors. The reception area. The new small lounge decorated with hundreds of old books that cost him R1 (about 8 cents) each. The dining room, which is grand and inviting with a menu to match.

Engblom honors Zulu sculptors and artists in some of the bedrooms, each of which has a theme. His imaginative self-dyed fabrics curtain many of the windows. His assembled quirky collages comprised of old photos, postcards, screened prints and found items with historic and/or tongue-in-cheek carnal themes decorate many of the walls.

He has also given ample space to his Mpunzi Shezi series, examples of which can be seen in galleries around Durban and which will go to Austria for an exhibition in a new gallery Durban architect Paul Mikula is opening in a cave in Salzburg. Engblom’s brief is to make the space work and in return, he will be the first to exhibit there (in September 2016).

So, when you visit The George, Engblom might point out the cow Shezi took from Goa (where he is worshipped by a small sect) to Queen Victoria. You will see the historic vibrator British women used when their men went off to war. With much of this, you’re never sure what are “George” stories and where fact meets figment. But everywhere, you are amazed and entertained. So who cares?

Engblom, a history buff who knows how to present history in an entertaining way, has, as part of the decor, blown up historic prints for his themed rooms.

I slept, for example, in the John Dunn corridor where, along with Eshowe’s excellent Fort Nongqayi Museum Village, which architect Mikula had a large hand in setting up, you can learn more about Dunn — South Africa’s most famous Scottish immigrant (John Dunn of Inverness), who became diplomatic adviser to Zulu King Cetshwayo in the mid-19th-century and fathered more than 117 children by 48 Zulu wives — than you ever hoped to know.

The 100-plus-year-old hotel that once housed the Zululand stock exchange has a history that includes a number of owners (including a George) before Richard Chennells (also from an Eshowe family) took it over.

When Chennells bought the place, it was well-known for its busy bar and neglected hotel rooms.

Among other things, he has enlarged the bar and moved it out back. Being bigger, it’s perhaps busier, plus you can watch magnificent sunsets from the deck out over the forest. As The George is the ancestral home of the Zulu Blonde Ale, made right here at Chennells’ Zululand Brewing Company, it is fitting that the bar should look onto this soon-to-be-expanded facility.

Zulu Blonde proved such a hit in Britain that it is now brewed and bottled in Bath (a city in the county of Somerset, England). Chennells trained as a craft beer brewer in the United States. Not surprising, given the expansive range or craft and artisanal breweries and brewers.

The beer is not sold bottled in South Africa. But at any time, there is Zulu Blonde being brewed out back in the brewery, along with a second, dark lager called Ninja Inja.

In South Africa it is sold only tap in this bar. You have to be lucky and arrive on time to drink it. And be warned, it disappears fast. The George’s bar (a sign from the hotel pointing to it provocatively reads, “Pablo Esco Bar: Never Pull Out”) operates as a gathering place like a traditional town square. Engblom’s decor ideas, many involving hot women and bright colors, raise temperatures before you lift a glass. Locals and visitors gather there to chat and drink and to eat pizza from the hotel’s new wood-fired oven.

It is also known as a music venue. Regular gigs and the attention they attract are another reason the beer disappears fast.

During my quick two days spent at The George, I packed in some of these Eshowe highlights. A visit to Fort Nongqayi Museum Village where tour guide Zanoxolo Mkhize took me to the chapel and gave me a brief lesson on the Norwegian missionaries who brought Christianity to the area. (Norwegians, in part, sponsored the museum upgrade.) In the old fort, he shows me the area’s first newspaper, intriguingly titled The Sausage Wrap, and the original tsetse fly eradication trap (pictured above).

On the same property we skimmed through the Mikula-designed Vukani Museum, that is a trove of basketry and clay that is now dying out, which when collected by a Swedish visionary revived the then-dying (and now dying again) art of basketry.

We walked the Dlinza Forest aerial boardwalk, built on towering stilts and peaking at the top of a soaring metal tower that serves as a look-out over the top of the forest. We pop in at the Wall Room Cafe at The House, which is a restaurant and hang-out venue that is cool and trendy enough (with a menu to match) to be situated in some upscale big city suburb.

We buy T-bone steaks at the funky SuperMeats butchery on the main street and shisa nyama (African barbecue over fire and a grate) them to perfection over a fire and a grate shared in the backyard with the locals then trip our way back to The George through the dusty and bustling taxi rank.

The George, by any name, would rank high in the eccentricity stakes. But come to think of it, the idiosyncrasies extend way beyond the hotel. Eshowe could easily don the tag “South Africa’s most eccentric rural town.”

It’s a steamy summer day in the sub-tropical city of Durban. We’re at the U.S. Consul General’s residence. It’s a picnic lunch for the local American community. We’re here to meet consular staff to hear about the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and to learn about other initiatives and services offered by this branch of the U.S. Diplomatic Mission to South Africa. Guests have been asked to bring and share a main dish. Drinks and desserts would be provided, the invite from our host, Consul General Frances Chisholm, said.

The expansive flat outdoor reception area, off the columned porch of the stately two story house with its sizable tiered, shrub-filled garden, is decked with umbrellas. Tables set out in a shaded area are crammed with an enticing selection ranging from sushi, barbecue chicken and small savory quiches and pies to summery salads. The view from the garden is across to the Indian Ocean, shimmering blue off in the distance under the cloudless sky, and dotted along the horizon with ships waiting for a berth in one of Africa’s busiest ports.

When coffee is served, I make my way to the dessert table and strike up a conversation with the man in the starched white jacket attending to the sweet-toothed. I learn that Sandile Ngcobo has been the chef at the Durban Consul General’s residence for 10 years. Desserts are one of his passions and all the treats on the table are his creations, from the malva pudding; a South African specialty, to his irresistible version of the classic American Toll House — chocolate chip — cookie.

I pepper the congenial Ngcobo with questions. How did a Zulu man, a product of apartheid-era South Africa, from a family that couldn’t afford to send him to college, get from there — to here? From crowded Fourth of July festivities, to formal sit-down business meetings; from kings (the Zulu king), to countrymen (visitors from the U.S.); from delegates on official business to the Consul General’s breakfast (to date, during Ngcobo’s tenure there have been three consul generals); it is he who does the honors. He speaks of kitchens on cruise ships and at bush lodges in his background. “Often at the end of a dinner, he gets a standing ovation,” a consular staffer tells me.

That afternoon there is only time to hear enough to whet my appetite, to ask Ngcobo if I might come back and interview him and to ask Chisholm for protocol advice on this.

Lunch Matters

Two months later, my car and I are security-checked twice in one week and given access to the consular compound. The first time, I arrive with camera and notebook to talk with Ngcobo. Consul General Chisholm joins us for a quick break in her day to add to the conversation and to share a sublime three-course surprise lunch Ngcobo has specially prepared.

We start with fish cakes — a salmon and hake combo — served with pickled cherry tomatoes and chipotle mayonnaise. The dish is a visual and taste treat; the fish cakes are plump and juicy, the flavor combos mouth-watering.

It makes sense that a focus of the diplomatic mission’s table is diplomacy around what is served at it. “We take care, when we host, to respect people’s dietary concerns,” says Ngcobo. Thus, “We don’t generally use pork or cook with alcohol, even in desserts.”

He works collaboratively with the consul general and her staff on this.

“We have lunches here; also dinners, receptions, breakfasts. Promotion of bilateral trade and investment and our public health agenda and health initiatives are our two main functions in Durban,” says Chisholm, who hails from Massachusetts and who has devoted most of her foreign service career to the U.S. State Department’s Africa bureau. Among other places, she has previously held posts in Equatorial Guinea, Zimbabwe, Mexico and Bonn in Germany. She is fond of doing business over “the good old-fashioned American working lunch.”

When she’s “off duty” and simply at home in the consular residence, give Chisholm a piece of grilled fish with a green salad and a no-frills vinaigrette and she’s happy. Her passion, she shares, is to dig in the garden; to get earth under her nails. “I do that on Saturdays.” She’s planted a veggie garden out back. There’s red cabbage and kale in abundance. “There were a lot of chives recently and Sandile made a chive pesto. I had that on whole wheat pasta with a little grated parmesan on the top. Delicious.”

In the run-up to any official event, Chisholm’s executive assistant makes inquiries about guests’ dietary restrictions. “Some people don’t take salt or eggs or cheese or vegetable oil. There might be a vegan.”

Once Ngcobo has the list of who is coming and what they will, or more specifically will not eat, and paying attention to the budget for the event and what is in season, he comes up with four menu options, which he and Chisholm then discuss and choose from. Between them, they also decide on the wines.

Our second course at lunch is a beautifully plated meal of three-cheese — Cheddar, provolone and blue — ostrich quesadillas. Why ostrich? It was what he had in the fridge, he says. And I’ve already learned he has a passion for Mexican fare, developed during two years spent as chef on a mammoth luxury cruise liner. The meal is delicate, the meat tender, the flavors, augmented by the peppers he has used, harmonious.

We end with the lightest melt-in-the-mouth fresh-orange flan topped with sour cream and chewy caramelized orange zest. By now Chisholm has gone. Back to the consular offices in Durban’s bustling high-rise downtown. Her dessert, like most of her quesadilla, is put in the fridge for her dinner.

Dinner and Dancers

The second time I visit the compound that week, it’s to see Ngcobo handle a live event: a reception and sit-down buffet dinner for members of the Limón Dance Company in South Africa from the U.S. to showcase their legendary modern dance prowess and to train local dancers.

Not much time to chat with him this time as guests sip on wine while, in the background, Ngcobo, assisted by his helper, Paulos Gumede, puts the finishing touches to a meal at which there is a South African guest who is gluten-intolerant (he used buckwheat instead of quinoa) and who said she did not eat eggplant (instead of the planned eggplant parmigiana, there is ratatouille). He introduces the U.S. visitors to the South African specialty of biltong (a kind of jerky), which he is serving up as snacks on toothpicks with melted cheese.

Sea and Bush Adventures

Ngcobo's career as a fine-dining chef, master of international cuisines, lover of classic Mexican fare, is pretty remarkable tracing it back. It started when the young Zulu township lad got a job in a bakery as a cleaner after his father died to help support the family.

He liked the bakery. He saw the plight of his jobless friends; how they were drifting into crime. “I realized I needed to get into a higher learning institute.” With only enough for a deposit, he enrolled at the equivalent of a city college culinary school.

After trying door-to-door sales to buy things such as his uniforms and chef’s knife, the bakery owner, noting Ngcobo’s potential, helped him get a night-time job in the kitchen at Durban’s Hilton Hotel. “I quickly realized I loved being in the kitchen,” he says.

Close to the end of his three-year college course and encouraged by a chef friend, Ngcobo sent his resume to Royal Caribbean cruise lines. They offered him a job. His first time on a plane was to fly from Johannesburg via JFK in New York to San Juan in Puerto Rico. “Yes, it was very scary,” he says, remembering back. “I had no clue, really, where I was going or what to expect.”

Once there, he found himself aboard a cruise liner much bigger than the Hilton. “There were 3,500 guests and 11 decks, each with a kitchen. The work, two years of it, was hectic. I learned so much.” And not just about travel: the Caribbean, the Bahamas, the Panama Canal, the Pacific, Hawaii, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Alaska. Wherever possible, he would head ashore for the three hours kitchen staff could be in port, to explore and see the sights.

Meanwhile, he was cooking for guests from all over the world. Mastering different international cuisines. Learning the intricacies of ice sculpting and perfect plating. Getting first-hand tips from his chef friends on authentic preparation of their favorite country dishes.

After two years and two contracts, he felt it was time to go home. Back in South Africa, thanks to a referral from a Hilton Hotel chef he’d worked with, almost instantly Ngcobo found himself in the bush. Namely, at South Africa’s Highveld Welgevonden Game Reserve, which had two luxury lodges on the property: Nungubane Game Lodge and Shidzidzi Game Lodge. These had star appeal. They attracted celebrity guests. Cast members of "The Bold and The Beautiful" come to mind. But they came to escape. To be incognito. Ngcobo is not naming names.

Living and working there came with all the attractions of the bush. The “big five” roamed the reserve. In the kitchen he cooked eland and kudu; springbok carpaccio was a favorite; ostrich fillets, duck and quail were commonplace. It was fine dining at its most exclusive. Outside the kitchen, “Our lodge had a fence but it wasn’t unusual to spot a lion at the gate; an elephant just outside; a mamba along the path to the kitchen.”

Four years after starting there, having resigned so he could return to Durban to be closer to his baby daughter, Ngcobo got a call from a headhunter who had his resume. The U.S. Consul General in Durban — where he had once done Fourth of July duties as a trainee chef — was looking for a chef and property manager. The rest is history.

“It’s quite a well known fact that one dines well at the American consul’s residence here in Durban,” to quote Consul General Chisholm. “Lovely food and the beautiful setting are conducive to good discussions and good business. You want people to be comfortable. I think it is U.S. taxpayer’s money well spent.”

Logically, one should pack binoculars and a flashlight for a bush escape. But somehow the three pairs of binocs floating around the apartment in Durban don’t get a look-in. Neither do the three new load-shedding rechargeable lights waiting to be tested.

What does find their way into my “getaway” stash are Prince Albert “Karoo blend” olive oil, a package of frozen ostrich fillet that’s been sitting in the deep freeze for a couple of months, a tin of Polish sprats that have been waiting to be devoured since I bought them, in Poland, and brought them back eight months ago, a bottle of Haute Cabriere unwooded pinot noir and a couple of other decent South African wines.

Then there are few assorted cans (sardines, tuna and a tomato and herb “blend”) and a packet of angel hair pasta. When in South Africa and buying provisions, the food stores in Woolworths are the place to shop.

Oh yes, and a coffee grinder, Columbian beans, filter paper for single-cup pourings, Pro Vita, Joko tea, French butter, double cream yoghurt and eggs. A random assortment but this was a get-in-the-car-and-go kind of trip, which could be easily replicated by anyone holidaying in the KwaZulu-Natal city of Durban, South Africa.

Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park — the 96,000 hectare park encompassing two of Africa’s oldest reserves (Hluhluwe) is around three hours by car north of Durban. I e-mail the Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife offices on the Monday and get a three-night booking in a self-catering unit at Hilltop camp, Hluhluwe, for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights of the same week. It’s not school holidays but I don’t get the Saturday as it’s a long weekend.

I will find a well-stocked shop at Hilltop from which I will only need to buy fresh milk and a bottle of water — the water because, while the shop assistant tells me I can drink from the tap, she also tells me the water doesn’t taste to good.

I drive into the game park via the entrance closest to the rural Zululand metropolis of Mtubatuba. My friend Carole has said she doesn’t like Hilltop camp at Hluhluwe as it is touristy. She laments I couldn’t get into Mpila camp in Imfolozi.

I drive along the reserve’s rutted dirt road to Mpila on the Imfolozi side first, to check it out. This is the preserve of animals and adventurers. You drive to look for game — not to get there fast. At Mpila camp there is no lodge with dining room and bar, no store, no swimming pool, all of which they have at Hilltop.

The camp does feel remote. I can see why she likes it. She likes to self-cater to the extreme. Probably would make sour-dough bread there. Would definitely want to prepare three designer camping meals, including a special breakfasts

Turns out I am happy to arrive at Hilltop about an hour and several elephant and giraffe spottings later, and would choose it again. I like that I hear assorted languages and people with accents. It makes me feel I’m far away and somewhere remote, exotic and international. And my self-catering unit fee includes breakfast in the dining room. This works for me after a dawn game drive. (You can book and go with a camp vehicle but as I was there to escape and enjoy the freedom of the place, I drove myself.)

The restaurant offers buffet dinners and an a la carte lunch menu for committed non-self-caterers, day-trippers and those who just feel inclined to dine there.

On my second day there, a friendly neighbor booked into a nearby self-catering rondavel offers to drive me to where there’s been a lion kill. The spot they nailed their buffalo is strategic for visitors — in a dry riverbed right where the road runs over a low concrete bridge. We watch for a good 20 minutes and see the three lionesses in the pride indulge themselves while the two lions, clearly sated, stretch and occasionally emit what sounds like a contented roar from a spot further off.

My new acquaintance then offers to share the fire he’s making for himself and a documentary filmmaker friend of his who has flown in from New York. They eat flat chicken bought from the camp store and cooked barbecue-style (they didn’t know their booking was self-catering so didn’t come prepared). I eat my ostrich. Highly recommended, doused in a little olive oil and sprinkled with Himalayan sea salt from my stash.

During my stay I purchase a bright intricately woven telephone wire basket from the Vulamehlo Craft Market about 10 minutes from the Nyalazi Gate park entrance, near the Centenary Center.

That’s on my first day when, besides the ellies and giraffe, I see assorted buck, white rhino, warthog and wildebeest — and enjoy the space, the quite, the solitude, my little old car skipping merrily over the potholed roads, some places tarred, others gravel and mainly rough and in places, pitted dirt.

On days two and three, I see more rhino. Quite a few. Usually in pairs. I see members of the anti-poaching rhino unit patrolling deep in the reserve. Someone in the cottage next to me arrives in camp with a smashed windscreen, a broken light and a squashed car hood. It turns out an angry elephant tried to stand on his vehicle.

I go early the second morning in my own little vehicle to the lion kill I saw the afternoon before. My car trundles along the “suggested for four-wheel drive vehicles only” road like it was made for it.

Lion Kill Viewing

When I get there three lionesses are devouring what’s left of the carcass for breakfast. I get a spot less than 10 yards from them and watch them through my passenger window.

Also memorable is the commotion caused when a vervet monkey steals a hamburger from the plate of a guest eating lunch on the Hilltop terrace. Also, doing a pedicure at a deserted time of day outside my rondavel with a bush buck, guinea fowl and a troop of Somango monkeys for company.

The daily rate at Hilltop in the self catering unit for one person, bed and breakfast, is R570 a night (as of August 2015). About $50 at the current exchange rate. (Add about R250 per night for two people.)

The park conservation levy is R145 per night for international visitors — half if you provide a South African ID. The kitchen has six stoves and washing facilities. Very well set up. The communal bath and loos were clean and never crowded. There are many fully equipped chalets and other residence options for larger groups or those who don’t want to engage in this sharing of facilities.

What impressed me was that whether sitting inside our outside my thatched rondavel, I never heard any loud human noises (like raised voices). Lots of bird noises, yes, and someone pointed out hyena noises and at the lion kill, crunching noises, and more stars than I remember every seeing in a night sky before...

The binocs would have been useful as a herd of buffalo from far off can look like a herd of cows. Although the little solar flashlight I took was quite adequate to get me about at night.

This is a great escape for anyone traveling to South Africa and visiting Durban.

International visitors love Cape Town. It’s their favorite South African city to eat, drink (the wine culture dates back to 1659) and make merry. And it’s easy to see why on a clear day with Table Mountain looming and the restaurants, beaches and the many distinct neighborhood hubs and suburbs buzzing.

“We’re meeting for coffee at Helen Zille’s tomorrow,” my friend and informal Cape Town guide tells me. This friend has lived in the Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa, she’s lived in Greece, she’s traveled extensively in Europe (and still does) and has based herself in Cape Town for the past dozen years. “The place is a gem,” she says. “Just so much going on.”

I don’t ask her why Helen Zille has invited us for coffee, which is what it sounds like. Zille is the former mayor of Cape Town. She’s Premier of the Western Cape, where Cape Town, South Africa’s legislative capital and the seat of Parliament, is located. She’s leader of the Democratic Alliance or DA, the country’s chief opposition party (to President Jacob Zuma’s African National Congress or ANC).

As it turns out, coffee with Zille is a euphemism for coffee in her garden. When Cape Town’s biggest and best foodie market, the Saturday morning Oranjezicht City Farm Market had to vacate its old premises, Zilla offered them the use of the huge garden at Leeuwenhof, her official residence; a garden where Table Mountain hovers as the backdrop. It’s a favorite with the more affluent and sustainably conscious set who arrive in droves to picnic and stock up for the week. It’s a great place to make like a local and get a feel for what’s cooking in this part of the world if you’re a tourist.

Last year (2014), Cape Town was named the best place in the world to visit by both the New York Times and the British Daily Telegraph. It’s South Africa’s most European city. The climate is Mediterranean. Capetonians who visit San Francisco often remark that there are similarities. One is that in both cities, no matter how hot the weather, it’s always wise to take a jacket because on a dime, the fog can descend and the temperature can change from balmy to biting.

I just spent five days in Cape Town. Not my first visit, but my first in a while. There are things I didn’t do that lots of people go there for, like diving with great white sharks off Gansbaai, a two-hour scenic drive from the city center and hanging out with cheetah cubs near Stellenbosch (I did go to this historic wine country and university town and you must too), both of which a friend from Oakland, Calif., previously traveled to Cape Town to do.

Let Me Share Some Highlights

Straight from Cape Town International, we headed for the (V&A) Waterfront. Unlike Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, which many locals will tell you is just for tourists, this waterfront is a magnet for both Capetonians and the international set.

That evening, wandering around, we watched people riding the imposing Cape Wheel, which is the city’s equivalent of the London Eye, and checked out the Table Bay Hotel where President Barack and Michelle Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia have all stayed.

The hotel, which looks across Table Bay to Robben Island Prison, where the late Nelson Mandela spent much of his 27-year prison sentence (take a guided ferry trip from the Waterfront), has seen many other big-name visitors. Charlize Theron, Michael Jackson, Chris Rock, Stevie Wonder, Robert De Niro and Snoop Dogg to name a few. (Cape Town — the Hollywood of Africa — is one of the world’s new filming hot-spots.)

That first night we drank beer and snacked on “slap chips” (the South African version of fries) at Mitchell’s Scottish Ale House (and waterfront brewery).

Over the next few days we returned to the Waterfront a few times. Highlights: lunch at the V&A Market on the Wharf, a two-storied artisanal food court with offerings ranging from raw vegan to plump and juicy beef burgers; exploring The Watershed, the new arts, crafts and design (shopping) space; browsing and buying a couple of bottles from the Vaughan Johnson Wine Shop.

And having lunch with our feet in the sand at the Grand Africa Café and Beach restaurant where, as the blurb for the place says, “grand-chic meets retro-romance” in tongue-in-cheek X-treme fashion with chandeliers, a seasonal menu offering a variety of seafood including great piles of it on platters, wild game dishes (kudu loin), and tables in the sand in good weather (you dine inside the renovated grandiose warehouse building in inclement weather).

Meanwhile, on day two we headed for the city bowl, as they call their downtown with its mountain vista. The rest of Africa meets South Africa and the world at Greenmarket Square where traders from Central, West, East and Sub-Saharan Africa set up shop each day. This is a short stroll from the Long Street Antique Arcade, if you’re into vintage items from jewelery to clothing or militaria, maps and antiquated cameras. Just round the corner is the Church Street antique market where we stopped in at Cafè Mozart for coffee, cake and a little Parisian ambience.

Also check out the Pan African Market on Long Street, which is a multi-level maze of stores where you’ll find traders busy packing carvings, folk art and other African art items to send to clients and customers overseas. The gorgeous old Victorian building with its balconies wouldn’t be out of place in New Orleans. The restaurant spilling onto the balcony upstairs is also worth a stop.

You can walk to Parliament from here, past (Anglican) St. George’s Cathedral, known as “the people’s cathedral” for its role in the resistance against apartheid and the oldest cathedral in Southern Africa. When you’re passing, check out who’s playing in the basement Crypt Jazz Restaurant. It’s near the National Gallery for art lovers and the Company’s Garden, which dates back to 1652, for plant and urban landscape enthusiasts. At the Company’s Garden Restaurant you’ll find fresh and local flavors and I can vouch for their excellent melktert (milk tart), a South African specialty.

From Zille’s, we headed to another of Cape Town’s can’t-miss foodie destinations, the Old Biscuit Mill. Here, dozens of food stalls open up to the crowds on Saturday morning. When you get tired of standing in endless lines and wowing at the selections, you can shop in a bunch of stores that are open all week or sit in a regular restaurant in this trendy old renovated mill complex. If you want to visit The Test Kitchen, which has a six-month waiting list, plan ahead and book.

Side Trips from Cape Town:

We drove via Stellenbosch to Franschoek, sometimes called SA’s food and wine capital. Just near Franschoek we made sure to stop in at Babylonstoren, a most amazing farm with designer veggie gardens and a restaurant with a two-month wait list. They also have a café in a large glassed-in greenhouse. There you can make up your own sandwich from the fresh farm ingredients, choose from their cheeseroom or charcuterie selection, sip on a Babylonstoren viognier or shiraz. And drink a toast to life down near the southern tip of Africa.

“You must let me write about you,” I convinced Cuisine Noir’s publisher and editor in chief. And in Black History Month, given that Williams has been making history: honoring, promoting, showcasing African Americans and relevant movers and shakers in food, wine and travel in the African diaspora—more frequently from a global perspective — since she re-launched the magazine in its present format five years ago in September 2009.

“Increasingly we’re reaching people — and reaching out to people —in the African diaspora,” says the committed non-self-promoting 40-something California transplant who, fueled by passion and determination, has been raising the bar month after month on the online magazine and its various spin-offs, including several print editions.

There’s her culinary-flavored base: “African Americans in the U.S.” and then Blacks from Africa and around the world.Increasingly and inclusively, she is scoping out and featuring food, wine and travel stories from across the African continent, from the UK and Europe, the Caribbean — and so on.

“I’m very excited to be able to showcase what Blacks are doing around the world. The influence and input we have had and increasingly have, not just via our different cuisines.”

“I see what we’re doing with Cuisine Noir as a cultural movement. We’re able to showcase our culture in a way that has never been done before."

“We naturally gravitate to people who look like us. Readers look at who we feature in Cuisine Noir and say, ‘I didn’t know black people were doing that.’ Black people are seeing themselves in new ways, which opens up new possibilities. Someone might take a leap and see themselves, now, as a chef or a TV personality because they see it’s possible.”

But — “while our editorial focus — our niche — is about Blacks around the world, Cuisine Noir is attractive to a diverse readership. If you put out a good product and people like it, they will read it.”

Williams' Food Story

“I grew up in Illinois. We were a typical family who ate typical soul food dishes. We didn’t know about eating seasonal per se and iceberg was the only lettuce I knew.”

“When I got to California to do my [advertising] internship and I was served a spring mix at an awards luncheon and I didn’t know what it was and declined to eat it. I still laugh at that to this day because it reminds me of how far I have come in my food journey.”

“Naturally my taste buds have expanded. Moving to California and working with the magazine did that. And as I started to learn more about food, the more I excited I became. Then the politics started to come in.The more you learn, the more it opens your eyes. I also started looking at immigration a little differently. You look at who is growing the food and who is picking it in the fields. You start seeing issues around food in a different way and how complex and interesting it can be.”

Food Matters

“First, we want people to get back into the kitchen. Due to our busy lives, we don’t do Sunday dinners enough anymore. And people used to eat off the land: real food, not fast-food. Part of the education is taking people back. Relearning traditions. There’s a whole world of food out there. It’s exciting. There are professional cooks and great home cooks. And then there are trends. Kale was the wonder child of 2014. Cauliflower is the wonder child of 2015.”

Go to any major food function with a media presence in the Bay Area or, for example, to the Travel & Adventure Show in one of its many locations and you’ll most likely run into the indefatigable Williams. She might be organizing a panel discussion or sponsoring a stage featuring chefs offering entertaining and educational cooking demonstrations.

The food philosophy Williams preaches and her commitment to education around food matters runs far deeper than creating a successful magazine. Beyond Cuisine Noir, you will find her in the community helping others “to look at healthy eating as a way of life,” she says. “Being a change agent is important to me. How do I do this? Essentially, by helping adults and children understand how what they eat impacts their bodies and their health.”

Looking Back

Cuisine Noir grew from a magazine founded in 1998 by Chef Richard Pannell, then living in LA and now in Sacramento. He had noted that while there were black chefs, you never got to read about them or hear about them. His erstwhile magazine, Black Cuisine (the name before changing it to Cuisine Noir), started as an insert in the LA Watts Times. “We met 2005,” says Williams. “He called me 2007 with the idea of having me do PR for him. I thought his concept was intriguing and knew I wanted to do more than PR. I wanted to partner.”

A grad student at the time, Williams was into multi-cultural marketing. It wasn’t too long before that the magazine was featuring some of the new black chefs on the Food Network as well as other trendsetters around the country.

She became the publisher in 2008 and with saw an opportunity to restructure the magazine around food, wine and travel which seemed a natural progression which has been very successful.

What I’ve Learned

“When you’re a start-up and have a small team and you’re in this industry, you learn that things happen when and how they need to happen and it’s not necessarily overnight. So I am learning patience,” says Williams.

“I’ve learned to hold my focus on delivering a fantastic product, not on where I want the magazine to be by way of size, subscriptions, distribution and everything else. I would have thought that after five years we’d be further along in certain areas. But do you know what? A lot of publications don’t survive for one year let alone five.So now I am learning to enjoy the journey instead of rushing to reach the destination.”

“I won’t say it’s been an easy five years, but we’ve been creating a movement and creating excitement for five years. And with the plans to take Cuisine Noir to the next level, I know we’ll get where we need to be when it is the right time to be there.”

You can eat more, slim down, get fit, and enjoy a whole new relationship with your body starting today and one step at a time.

Krista Riddley learned about health and nutrition first-hand — through personal experience and from the inside out — when she was living in Africa doing international relief and development work.

The Columbia University Masters graduate (international affairs was her field) worked for 10 years in West and Southern Africa (followed by another 10 in DC), doing advocacy work around human rights abuses, natural disasters, emergency response and other weighty issues. During her stint in Africa, she learned to love the foods of her heritage.

“Do you know the organization Oldways? They have food pyramids for different ethnic backgrounds. The one for African Americans — their African Heritage Diet Pyramid — is very different from the U.S. government food pyramid. It is based on our traditional foods, what our ancestors ate in Africa; things like yams, tubers, beans, grains and nuts.

“I loved the greens I found when I was living in Africa. Some, like potato greens, you don’t get here. But you can use collard greens. In Africa they tend to load the veggies with oils, like palm oil. You might just sauté them with onions and garlic. It’s very tasty. And they tend to serve this over rice. Peanut sauce is a good addition. To lighten the peanut sauce you can add eggplant and maybe squash and some broth. That was another African find that’s great over rice.”

Back to her main work in Africa. To keep herself from being overcome by the sadness, the pain and the conflict she was dealing with day to day, in her job, Riddley started working out.

As she got fitter and more into a training routine, she started competing in figure competitions, which is a type of body building “but not as big and bulky,” she says. More about muscle definition and symmetry than size.

A spin-off was that she learned a lot about what and how to eat “to get my body in a certain shape and to look a certain way.”

At some point, burned out in her work, “I decided to take a break. Since I’d been doing fitness work for myself, I decided to get a certificate in fitness training, another in health coaching and one in holistic nutrition.” These became her new line of work.

Now 50, Krista Riddley still works out, “but I haven’t done competitions for a few years. They take a lot of time.”

Instead, the health and wellness coach focuses on helping “successful, motivated, enlightened black women — sisters — to fulfill their life’s dreams by teaching them how to reclaim their bodies and reawaken their core self confidence.”

I asked Riddley, who gives regular tips on her Facebook page, to give Cuisine Noir readers some health, fitness and weight loss suggestions for the new year. Her hubby is a “crazy marathoner” whose goal was to run 50 marathons before he turned 50 and he’s run 48 at age 48. I mention this because while her focus is women, all that she suggests applies to men too.

Ten steps to a fitter, slimmer and healthier you:

1. First things first: Make sure you’re clear as to why you want to lose weight and get fit. Dig into the big WHY or you may end up petering out. For example, do you want to lose weight because your husband is complaining — or because you want to chase your kids around the playground or don't want to get diabetes like your grandmother.

2. Easy equals effective: Once you know your goals and your values, take baby steps. Start by eating cleaner whole foods that don't come in a box or package or that you add water to so that it turns into something. Eat food that has a mother or comes from the ground.

3. Eat breakfast: When you don’t, your body tends to crave sugar. Then you go for a pastry. A healthy breakfast? As for any meal, combine a protein (slows the digestion), a carb source and a little fat. Try a scrambled egg with a little spinach made with a little oil and some oatmeal. Or plain Greek yoghurt with your own fresh fruit added and some dry cereal or nuts for crunch.

4. Drink more water: People often think they are hungry when they are thirsty. A lot of us are chronically dehydrated. Your organs work with water. To make water more interesting, create fruit infusions. Cut up some fresh fruit — apple, orange, or lemon slices — and drop these in the water jug. Frozen fruit can work well too. Looks attractive and tastes great.

5. Don’t deprive yourself: Instead of removing things you love, add new — healthy things. If you haven’t been eating greens, add some. Try fruits you don’t usually eat. Slowly replace unhealthy foods with healthy foods. Healthier foods will fill you up and slowly but surely displace the unhealthy items.

6. The sugar demon: Look at labels and avoid ingredients that end in “ose” (as in high fructose), anything with a “tol” (as in Maltitol) or anything made into a “syrup,” even if it says brown rice syrup, because brown rice is healthy but not as a syrup. If you eat less boxed and packaged foods, you will already be eating less sugar. If you have five sodas a day, start off by replacing one with a fruit infusion — then reduce more.

7. Time tips: Try batch cooking. If you only keep good food in the fridge and kitchen you will only eat good food. On a Sunday, cook a big pot of soup or greens or several chicken breasts. It’s much easier to eat healthy if you have the right foods on hand. Google “healthy one-pot meals” and see what pops up for ideas.

8. Grain time: Whole grains are great for keeping you full through the day. My favorite is quinoa, which is in fact a seed but cooks like a grain and is high in protein. Some lovely things you can do with quinoa? Add black beans, corn, tomato and lemon for a quick and simple cold salad. Throw in some chicken you’ve cooked previously, add a side salad and you have a great meal.

If the holidays are a time to celebrate traditions of a culinary nature (and who could argue that?), then any time is party time in Krakow, Poland’s culinary travel ground zero and this must-visit central European country’s favorite city to eat, drink and make merry.

The entire country of Poland has seen a culinary renaissance. It goes far beyond the legendary soups, sauces, venison, ubiquitous pierogi (dumplings) and seasonal dishes, especially those made with forest-foraged mushrooms and wild and cultivated berries. It’s all been happening, chefs you meet will tell you, since the restrictive post-World War II Soviet/communist regime with its prohibitions ended a short 25 years ago.

“When I came here 18 years ago the Polish traditions had all but died out,” says Aziz Seck, erstwhile basketball player (it’s what brought him to Poland), acclaimed cocktail mixer, a transplant from Africa via France and owner of Café Baobab, a Senegalese bar and restaurant in Poland’s capital Warsaw, about three hours by train from Krakow.

While Seck is intent of promoting the best of his African roots in Poland, he acknowledges that Poles are doing the same with their culture. “This country was closed for a long time under communism. Now the scene is vibrant. People are cooking. The markets are filled with local produce. A generation of new young Polish chefs are reviving and promoting traditions.

“Poland is now open for the world. The people are enthusiastic, hard working, entrepreneurial. The country is moving forward. The Poles want to showcase their culinary traditions. There’s a positive atmosphere. Many changes and all for the better.”

I recently spent three weeks in Poland, a large chunk of that time in Krakow. So what would I say is the reason it’s the country’s top tourist city? Well, it has the largest Medieval market square in Europe. This expansive pedestrian area is filled with glorious architecture and throbs with life day and night. It’s crammed with restaurants, cafes, pubs, clubs with music, vodka bars and in the summertime, al fresco food markets and entertainers. Churches too that are awe-inspiring, whatever your faith — and sometimes music-filled. I went to a chamber music concert in one. Oh, and a fabulous Chopin piano recital upstairs in an old palace right on the square.

Poland is now part of the European Union. That it still uses the Polish złoty currency (not the Euro) means prices are excellent for U.S. travelers.

As a holiday gift, dear readers, I share seven of my most delicious Krakow holiday highlights.

1. Nice to Meat You

Adam Chrząstowski is a delight. He is the chef at Ed Red, one of the many great restaurants in old-town Krakow close to the market square. It’s a meat restaurant, he says. They’ve only been open six months and were the first restaurant in Poland to dry-age their beef.

He talks about how culinary traditions are reviving in the post-Soviet era. “People are becoming interested in food again,” he says.

I say I’d like to try something local; traditional.

Be careful what you wish for comes to mind when the waitress puts down a plate and chef tells me the five items I’m about to eat are all from a young calf (veal):

brain made the Polish way, cleaned in water and vinegar then roasted with egg and parsley. “It was a classic bar snack before World War II that we’re reviving,” he says.

cheek with grated horseradish on pumpernickel

sweetbread (thymus)

tongue, with radish and chives on rye bread

and liver — with pear — on brioche. “We like to respect the whole animal,” he explains.

Verdict? Well, the idea of the brains threw me. But surprisingly, I’d eat his brains again.

2. Lunch in the Salt Mines

The Wieliczka Salt Mine is about half an hour by car from Krakow. You go underground to where there is a labyrinth — 200 miles of tunnels and 3,000 chambers. Everything is carved from salt including a 12 Apostles scene, a larger than life size replica of the late Polish Pope and even the “diamonds” in the chandeliers in a cavernous underground church where not only tourists go in droves, but mass is held on Sundays.

Something they’re promoting about one hour by car west of Krakow in and around a small town called Zator is Carp Valley and carp fishing. (Zator carp are famous — they’ve have been farmed in this area since the 14th century, would you believe.) The president of the Association of Royal Carp, Franciszek Sałaciak, has won awards for his breaded carp and his smoked carp. He catches a carp before we get there to show us how to fillet a carp for cooking and smoking. He serves us his carp, smoked on beech wood. It’s rich, succulent, juicy and delicious. Tourists are invited to go catch carp themselves.

4. Lovely Lanckorona

I think of myself as a city girl. So what was it about Lanckorona, about 45 minutes by car from Krakow, a country hamlet high on a hill, that instantly grabbed me?

Yes, the place is picture-postcard perfect. But so are a lot of other Polish towns, yet they did not have this effect.

Sure, almost every one of the 19th century wooden houses close to Lanckorona’s medieval “market” square makes you want to reach for your camera. And the view across the rooftops to rolling green hills and distant forests from the grounds of the church is stunning.

There is a single coffee shop. Eccentric in its details, Cafe Arka was built by a local ceramic artist who focused on the integrity of the village in every element of design and construction.

Now local gal Renata Bukowska is attempting to focus the world’s attention on the culinary traditions of the Lanckorona district and local and regional specialty products. She introduces me to two young women whose mission is to capture traditional recipes before the old people, who are privy to them, die with them. Worthy project, no?

She also takes me to a farm belonging to two women. The farm is called W Aroniach and they offer room rentals. (Yes, I would stay there.) The women cook traditional Polish food. They also make — most romantically, rose-infused vodka and jam.

5. Benedictine Abbey Road

Abbot Zygmunt Galoch is guest manager at the oldest monastery in Poland, the Benedictine Abbey in Tyniec, about half an hour by car from Krakow. Abbot Galoch tells us that lunch in Poland is the main meal. They call it dinner. And for lunch (dinner!) you have to have a soup, a meat or fish dish and dessert. “It’s obligatory,” he says with a wry smile, many times.

The abbey has a guest house with 50 rooms and 80 beds. You don’t have to be Catholic to stay there. He reminds us that Benedictine liquor (with 21 herbs) was invented by Benedictine monks.

We take breakfast with him, which includes a platter of breads, salamis, gherkins, pates, cheeses and more. All the products (and many more) are sold in the large shop (there’s also a restaurant and cafe) on the property where everything is sold under the Benedictine label.

6. Pod Baranem Na zdrowie!

It’s blustery and raining in Krakow for my lunch date at Pod Baranem, reputedly the most popular restaurant among locals who want to indulge in upscale seasonally inspired traditional Polish fare in the city’s vast medieval Old Town marketplace area. It’s run by father and son and you sit among paintings by Polish contemporary artist Edward Dwurnik.

I’ve barely had time to settle in when waiter Mariusz Scetlak brings me a what he tells me is “quince-infused vodka — made by the owner; to warm you up”. It accompanies a small platter that includes a tapas-size serving of steak tartare.

The tartare, prepped by Pod Baranem owner and chef Jan Baran’s “number-two chef” son, Patrick, is prepared with gherkin and marinated foraged mushrooms, both made in-house.

“We have to constantly plan around the seasons,” Chef Patrick tells me. “In mushroom season we buy foraged mushrooms and freeze them. We use 2,000 kg of fresh foraged mushrooms a year and 300 to 400kg of dried mushrooms.

“At the moment we’re making plum jams. The plums are in season. We freeze fresh berries to use all year and make jams which we can then reconstitute year-round in sauces, hot or cold.”

The berry mousse cheesecake I end my meal with is made from fresh berries. The intense berry drizzle in the velvety garnish that accompanies it is made from one of their berry jams, he says. It means they can keen this favorite on the menu all year.

I was offered the option of wine. It would have been French. Why, when the option was to sip on infused local vodkas made in-house?

7. Wine time in Polska

Poland doesn’t have a wine industry to speak of — yet.

But it does have eccentrics — and entrepreneurship.

Winemaker Marek Górscy, who grows French and Polish grapes against what might call “the winter odds” at his vineyard, Krokoszówka Górska, near Krakow, refused to tell his neighbors what he was planting when he started 10 years ago. “I knew they’d laugh at me,” he said.

They did laugh when spring came and they saw for themselves.

They’re not laughing now that 10 people in the area have followed suit and weekenders travel regularly from Krakow to taste and buy his wine.

Check out this link: Sarna Rose is President of Poland Culinary Vacations, based in Florida. Chat with her or explore her website if you’re interested in a culinary vacation or in Poland. A big plus: the site is in English!

]]>wanda@cuisinenoirmag.com (Wanda Hennig)Delicious LifeSat, 29 Nov 2014 10:57:13 -0800Do What You Love and a Delicious Life Will Followhttp://www.cuisinenoirmag.com/delicious-life/do-what-you-love-and-the-delicious-life-will-follow
http://www.cuisinenoirmag.com/delicious-life/do-what-you-love-and-the-delicious-life-will-follow

“Have an adventurous mind, don’t take yourself too seriously, speak less and listen more. And the day you stop liking what you do work-wise, start looking for something new.” These words of wisdom come from John Aritho: Kenyan-born hotelier, chef, world-traveler, old motorbike and car restorer — just to tip the iceberg.

Top of his game is an understatement to describe this charming, urbane 41-year-old Renaissance man who grew up in Kenya’s White Highlands, north of Nairobi: “a big farming community and the country’s bread basket.”

When it came to thinking of a career, “It was between basketball, being a chef or joining the Kenyan army.” While he was a good player, he knew basketball wasn’t a practical career choice. His dad, a surgeon who expected his son to follow him into medicine, nixed the Kenyan army. He was also aghast at the chef — “A cook?!” — idea.

Meanwhile, Aritho had discovered the joys of spicy food. “I had two Indian classmates. I’d be given mashed potato and stew for lunch. When I tasted what they brought, it was stunning. I offered to do their homework in exchange for their spicy food.”

And so it was “with my mum’s backing” and to his father’s consternation — “he was horrified and wouldn’t be part of it!” — that Aritho headed for India straight out of high school to train as a chef. The destination was a decision born from a mix of passion and pragmatism. “I wanted to get out on my own. Europe and the U.S. were too expensive and too ‘done.’”

He was drawn by the food. Plus, “I had a teenage rebelliousness.” India seemed exotic; a big adventure.

Eat, Play, Work in India

He went straight to a cookery school in Hydrabad in central India, where the focus was mainly south Indian dishes. He then made his way to Mangalore, close to Goa. “There, I enrolled myself at the university to do a bachelor’s degree in hotel management with a focus on food production.”

Aritho lived in India for four-and-a-half years and was quite an oddity. “An African with a massive Afro in the middle of India. They only knew about Africans from Sri Lanka and South Africa through cricket.”

As an extra college class in Mangalore, he enrolled to study French. Privately, during lunchtimes, he studied classical Arabic with an Imam. “That helped me in Dubai” (one of the many places he’s run large hotels. Keep reading!). And in the evenings he learned German “from an Indian gentleman who had lived there and taught three of us.”

There was no plan or goal in any of this. “The languages just interested me.”

He also learned a lot of Hindi in India — and picked up his travel bug and bike bug. He bought an old Yugoslavian motorbike. “I traveled state to state. Slept at the sides of the road. Met people in little villages who welcomed me in to enjoy their food.”

He also learned some travel take-aways. “I had to go from the south to New Delhi, six days and seven nights, in a second class train with about 2,000 people. So now when I travel, if something doesn’t go right, it’s a joke,” he laughs.

Aritho will tell you he got into food thanks to his mum. “Being the last-born of five — I was the ‘oops’ baby — I spent a lot of time with her in the kitchen. She’s a nurse who loves baking and cooking. I’d watch her and I had this fascination.”

Eighteen years and many adventures later, a lot of them work-inspired, he’s still with them.

Do What You Love

So where has he traveled via work? And how has it fed his foodie bent, given that he’s not the chef he planned to be, but the general manager running the show.

“I’ve lived and worked in Mozambique. I trained staff under trees to open a hotel. How to serve, starting with actually showing them what a spoon is. They couldn’t speak English. The only Portuguese I had was from a phrase book. Mozambique is a good merge between Europe and Africa in terms of lifestyle, cuisine, love of life. It’s very Mediterranean with an African-coastal laid-back feel.”

He’s lived and worked in the Seychelles on Praslin island. It’s a fabulous vacation destination and “the food is great thanks to the Indian influence.” But being marooned on an exotic island that people fantasize about and many only visit for a week or two in a lifetime, “you can get cabin fever very quickly.”

He’s lived and worked in Tanzania where he opened another of the group’s hotels. “I loved it. The Swahili influence of the food; very Omani-based food. Cloves, cardamom — not hot and spicy, but very aromatic. Even the tea is infused with spices. It’s the biggest producer of cloves and cardamon in world. In Zanzibar, they have an open air seafood bazaar every night, right on the beach.

An incidental he liked about Tanzania was the politeness and kindness of people. If you go to a restaurant and you want a Coke, he explains, how you ask for it is, like, “Please, may I disturb you and ask you, out of your kindness if I can have a Coke.”

He’s lived and worked in Zambia. “That was great because it gave me the opportunity do a lot of charity work. HIV is such a big thing there and I loved the fact I could help.” He formed a motorbike club. They’d ride, contribute money, raise money. “We created a bikers home for homeless children.”

Food-wise, what was served in the hotel in Zambia was Europe and South Africa-influenced. “Locally, they eat a lot of tuber food. Roots. It’s very starchy.” Nothing to write home about?

“Well, my staff would come to the canteen with locusts as a delicacy. They’d deep-fry them. Other time, it was worms, green and brown, deep fried. And termites, just before the rains. Also deep fried. The abdomen is full of unsaturated fats. In the beginning, I’d say, ‘You can’t be eating that!’”

“But then I ate them too, to show solidarity. But I didn’t get into them and they didn’t go onto the menu.” And then there were the field mice. “Regrettably, I tried those once. They looked so awful. The front teeth protruding and the very skinny tail. But we were in the middle of nowhere on motorbikes. There was nothing else and a woman was selling them barbecued.”

He says that initially, he wasn’t too keen to go and live and work in Dubai (at the Qamardeen and the Al Manzil). He thought it would be so Los Vegasy. But he liked it there, at least for the food.

“Dubai cuisine is basically Lebanese food. Because of the Indian and Pakistani labour force, there’s a lot of Indian-influence food. It’s almost impossible to get real Arabic food although you get the Syrian and Egyptian-influences.”

“The only part of dining in Dubai that’s not fun is that at most restaurants, except for those in hotels, you can’t have a glass of wine with your meal. You drink water or juice only. And the windows have to be shaded if there is alcohol.”

“But the beauty there is that you find so many cuisines. About 2.2 million out of 3 million who live there are foreign, every restaurant in the world is there and it’s fantastic. If you don’t find it in Dubai, it doesn’t exist.” On the down-side, “everything’s imported — onions from Pakistan, tomatoes from Italy — so you pay through your nose.”

He’s also traveled extensively in Europe and lived and worked for brief spells, mainly training stints of a few months, in the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Italy.

It’s About More Than the Money

“I’ve been in the same group — Southern Sun, now called Tsogo Sun — for 18 years. They use me a lot in terms of setting up and training staff; more behavior and consumer interaction. Soft skills. That’s where the need is biggest.”

When he travels not for work — this year he went to Brazil for three weeks and saw three World Cup matches and he was off to Mozambique two weeks after I spoke to him, at Tsogo Sun’s Maharani Hotel in Durban, South Africa, where he’s currently the GM — he stays in B&Bs. It was hostels in Brazil. “When I’m at hotels I’m always looking at the standards.” Not such a good way to get away!”

Aritho goes back to visit his mum and Kenya as often as he can. The rest of the family is spread out. One sister works in New York for the United Nations Food Program. His wife, Janine Douglas, who is Scottish, works for an American software company. “She’s an international traveler of note, regularly in Africa, the Middle East and the U.S. This month I’m seeing her for four days.”

In his life, he believes in balance and in linking things you love to do. “You need to connect the dots around the things you love. I love food, helping people, hosting people. Being a hotel manager, hospitality, is a natural thing.”

And in his career, he believes in the beauty of structure, which helps with the balance.

“As long as you can earn your daily bread, sit in your car and sing, you can stay happy. The day it’s not like that, start looking for something else. I’ve been in the same job 18 years but it keeps changing. My friends say, ‘When do you work?’ I’m learning scuba diving, I teach kids basketball, I’ve climbed Kili and two peaks in the Drakensberg. I take time out to travel. It’s about having the will, not having the money.

“If I had an accident tomorrow and lost two legs and two hands, I would have no regrets. I’ve done the most I could do.”

Can you guess what Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia and Norway have in common?

Here’s a hint, in the form of another question. Did you know that studies are done on the reputations of countries?

I didn’t, until I saw research results put out recently by the Reputation Institute, an international consulting firm that, well, does just this. They rank countries according to reputation.

Specifically they look to rate and rank qualities like beauty, enjoyment, appealing lifestyle, how friendly and welcoming the people are, safety, culture and efficiency.

I’m sticking to the categories that are likely to impact the traveler. Specifically the leisure, adventure, vacation, culinary or lifestyle traveler. Take your pick, wherever you best fit.

In other words, not the business traveler, although good and wise business travelers manage to fit in at least a bit of culture, culinary pleasure and enjoyment, if not all of the above.

The Top Five

OK. It’s summertime.

So where to this year — and why?

Seems a good place to start is with the five countries that have the best reputations.

The most recent reputation study asked 27,000 people to rank 50 countries across 15 categories. Click through to the Reputation Institute link to scrutinize all the data yourself.

For those happy with a summary, Canada won the title for a third year in a row with a score of 76.6 followed by Sweden (76.5), Switzerland (76.3), Australia (76.1) and Norway (74.1).

The U.S. came in twenty-third on the list at 57.4.

Way down at the bottom of the ladder were — probably not surprising, given what’s happening politically in them right now — Russia (36.7), Nigeria (34), Pakistan (28.8), Iran (22.6) and Iraq (21.2).

The List: Facts, Tips and Culinary Pleasures

Number One: Canada

So, Canada is cool and uber-delicious. There’s no getting away from it, they are geared to lifestyle and tourism and for the traveler with a culinary focus, as a country, can one do better? I can’t say I’m overly taken by the poutine and was alarmed when given a Yukon drink featuring a putrefied toe, but besides that, they just seem to do things really well.

Personal favorite places that I’ve been to and gone back to and would go back to again include Vancouver Island (food, wine and probably the best boutique hotel I’ve ever stayed at anywhere in the form of Brentwood Bay Resort and Spa) and the historic Empress Hotel in Victoria famed for its high teas, which are pretty touristy but still memorable; Vancouver — difficult to beat, as far as cities go, for diversity, culinary selection (it is currently ranked third-best food truck city in North America and if you like your beer fresh, local, delicious and enjoyed in good company, their craft beer scene is trending right now) and scenic beauty (beyond the winning water, mountains and architecture combination, Vancouver always looks scrubbed).

But let’s get some reasons why Canada deserves to be number one from the horse’s mouth, so as to speak, as in from someone who is a key figure in the Canadian food scene.

“Where I live in Toronto,” Rainford says, “we have just about every kind of restaurant you can imagine.

“We also have some of the most diverse chefs working in Canada.”

He names the following to look out for when you go visit.

“I have many friends whose food I’d recommend like Ned Bell from BC, Victor Bongo from the Congo also a BC guy, Claudio Aprile here in Toronto and Michael Pasto who is of Italian/French background, in Niagara, Ontario. Then there’s John Higgins — of Scottish heritage and also here in Toronto. Last but not least my own Chef de cuisine Richard Zephyrine from Trinidad.”

These, he says, “are just a few of my chef friends who are breaking food down and making Canadians happy one bite at a time.”

Rainford points out that a recent bylaws change has seen a new and vibrant food truck scene spring to life in Toronto “With people like Fidel Gastro and Zane Caplansky we’re in good hands.”

“This is only a small cross-section of what makes us a hot eating country.”

Go there to indulge in the food, enjoy all the other attributes, including scenic, that account for its hot reputation.

Number Two: Sweden

Sweden is runner-up on the reputation list. I haven’t been to Stockholm or anywhere else in Sweden, but having spoken to people who have, and done a fair amount of research, start by checking out this list of 20 top things to do in Stockholm, the capital.

You want to try Swedish food? Go explore the food section of your nearest Ikea store. You don’t believe me? Well, look at this list and tell me what you can’t get at Ikea! Ten things to know about Swedish food.

At the risk of getting roasted by some but agreed with by multitudes, I’m going to suggest that the best thing to come out of Sweden by way of food is Chef Marcus Samuelsson who grew up in the port city of Göteborg with a Swedish family. They adopted him and his sister after they recovered from the tuberculosis that took his mother’s life in Ethiopia.

The acclaimed New York chef and restaurant owner has said, including in his memoir, Yes, Chef, that his love of cooking was kindled in his Swedish grandmother’s kitchen, where he describes, “The yeasty aroma of freshly baked bread or the tang of drying rose hips hit you as soon as you walked in.”

Number Three: Switzerland

Everyone seems to love Switzerland, and not just the rich with Swiss bank accounts. Mountains and lakes and pastoral scenes of cows with bells round their necks, and watches and precision, and rosti, raclette and fondue. See the BBC’s list of Ten Top Foods to Try in Switzerland.

I was in Switzerland, not long enough to say I even began to get to know it, but for a couple of days some years ago, with my daughter, who was then age 13, at Lake Lucerne. We were doing Europe, the pair of us, and as happens when one travels with a sense of direction but without pre-arranged bookings or a set agenda, the unexpected happens (we were literally dropped off in Switzerland when our intended destination was Italy).

Being in Switzerland, naturally, we had to eat fondue. It took us forever to find a place that served us, but when we did, it was memorable. So I’ll say, go to Switzerland, eat a proper Swiss cheese fondue, stay to discover the attributes that makes it number three in terms of reputation. Then report back!

Number Four: Australia

Yes, it’s vast. Yes, you can go there for the Great Barrier Reef. Yes, you can ride miles across dessert. No, I’m not going to try to reduce Australia to a paragraph here.

Surveys have given Norway the tag “the happiest place on earth.” If you haven’t been, and I haven’t, yet, get a hint as to why to go there by scanning this Huffington Post piece on 25 reasons Norway is the greatest place on earth. Then think smoked salmon, juniper berries and lingonberries, midnight sun and Northern Lights — and pack your bag.

Cuisine Noir readers: If you’ve experienced in any of the “top reputation” countries above, please drop us a comment and share a few thoughts.

Contrast those descriptions with the familiar parental entreaty when the kid is sitting pushing food around his or her plate refusing to eat, "Think about the starving children in Africa." And add to that the reality of pictures of starving children in Africa.

Which of the above is more stereotypical — more characteristically associated with — "Africa" and "food?"

Chef Coco Reinarhz would rather have it be the former. You could say it's his mission — a mission rooted in a passion both for fine dining and for what Africa, with its diversity, has to offer in the realm of pleasures of the palate, specifically in the context of flavors, ingredients, specialty dishes and creative potential.

All the "fine dining" foodie terms above have been used to describe the internationally acclaimed chef's food. What he serves up has been written about as "innovative fine dining Afro-fusion heavily influenced by classic French cuisine" using some of the "most opulent of African flavors."

He recently paired Champagne (real, from France) with a tiger prawn dish from the Democratic Republic of Congo; marinated quail inspired by the Cote d'Ivoire, Nile perch from Tanzania, Argan oil rack of lamb a-la-Morocco and malva pudding from South Africa. "There is no reason African food should not look and taste fabulous and that it should not be served with Champagne," he says in a recent interview from the kitchen of his restaurant, Le Sel at The Cradle. That is, the Cradle of Humankind.

Along with his French culinary gems on his fine dining menu at his Johannesburg-based Sel et Poivre (he also has a bistro), Reinarhz has introduced dishes such as Ivorian Assigni crab, palm-nut infused chicken, amadumbe* (keep reading for how he prepares this typical African veggie) and wild mushroom mille feuilles, as well as reportedly exquisite yam and crayfish rice melange inspired by the Senegalese national dish, thiebou dienne.

We caught him as he was preparing to head off to Brazil to set up a fine dining pop-up African village in Rio for the duration of the 2014 Fifa World Cup (June 12 through July 13). There, he will be showcasing the cuisine of the five African countries competing. Namely, Ghana, Nigeria, the Cote d'Ivoire, Cameroon and Algeria. The dishes will all be paired with South African wines. "The South African team didn't make it into the World Cup, but South Africa is the biggest wine producer in Africa and has some of the world's best wines," he says.

Soul Food

Reinarhz knows about African-American soul food. Comfort food. Food that has its origins, in the U.S., in slavery. Food that, he says, probably came into being thanks to people pulled away from their families; foods relished by them in the early days because of food's evocative power. Food that would have linked them — taken them back — to their families left behind. To their roots.

But, he says, "The time has come to look at African food and African flavors through different eyes, not through the eyes of slavery. That's a really limited perspective and does no justice to what's possible and what's available."

He also knows what hunger looks like. Reinarhz was born and grew up in Burundi. If you haven't been there, small wonder, given that it's one of the continent's smallest countries — in Central Africa, landlocked and bordered by Rwanda to the north, Tanzania to the east and south and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the west.

If you Google it, you will learn that Burundi is one of the five poorest countries in the world. It has suffered much political turmoil and warfare. In its European colonial days it was occupied by Germany and by Belgium. It has the ignominious distinction of being one of the hungriest countries in the world, according to the Global Hunger Index of 2013. Its largest source of revenue is coffee, which makes up 93 percent of its exports.

Reinarhz points out that while Burundi's food diversity is small, especially compared to that of vast Congo next door — and a shadow of that of the Cote d'Ivoire in West Africa where, in Abidjan, Reinarhz has enjoyed some of his top gastronomic experiences in Africa — Burundi does have a culinary culture. Root vegetables that grow in the mountains. There's the coffee, as we've mentioned. And fish from nearby Lake Tanganyika.

It was enough to inspire his late mother, whose cooking excellence was expressed when she became the chef at a hotel in Burundi's capital, Bujumbura.

At some point the family moved to Kinshasa, capital of the vast Democratic Republic of Congo, where she was chef patronne at Pili Pili, at the time the most fashionable restaurant in the sprawling city.

Ecole Hotelière de Namur

That's where it all began for Reinarhz. He got his love of food and early cooking lessons from his mom. "She taught me about seasonal cooking. And also, how to keep things simple. Fusion is all very well but so often, what you end up with is confusion."

The 44-year-old French speaker (who speaks English with one of those oh-so-attractive don't stop talking French accents) did his formal chef training at the Hotel Management School at Ecole Hotelière de Namur in Belgium. He then worked as a chef in Belgium, in Kinshasa and then in the Cote d'Ivoire, before basing himself in Johannesburg, South Africa.

"I'd rather be in Africa than anywhere else in the world," he says. "In Europe, everything is done and overdone. You can still be pioneering in Africa."

Giving people this appreciation is up to chefs like him, he will tell you. And he will also tell you that he has an intense dislike for African restaurants designed for tourists. "The sort where people are playing drums, dancing and are dressed in African outfits.

"When I go to a French restaurant, I don't expect staff to be wearing French berets. It's a stereotype. Thinking of that cliched tourist sort of experience as African food is like me going to America and saying America food is only McDonald and America is Disneyland.

"That's not the African cuisine I'm promoting. I'm promoting fine dining, something elegant, something you wouldn't be ashamed to serve in a top-rated restaurant anywhere in the world."

Game and fish are very African, he says when we get into discussion about African specialty items. "And seafood — like crab. The way people eat crayfish in Mozambique is really an African way of eating."

Thinking of African food in terms of comfort food or any cliche "is like me saying Italian is only spaghetti Bolognese or pizza. Only someone who knows nothing about food will say that; someone who doesn't know how diverse and rich Italian cuisine is.

"African cuisine is similar.

"I believe our duty as African chefs to take African food to another level. Nobody will do it for us," says the judge on Little Cook, Big Cook, a 13-episode TV series currently running on South Africa's SABC 3.

Good eating African style!

* Amadumbe: Potatoes, Reinarhz points out, were once a peasant food eaten by the hungry of Ireland and elsewhere. Now, you get potatoes on the menus of Michelin-star establishments in the grand restaurants of Europe and beyond. So it is with amadumbe, a South African veggie that is half potato, half yam — unsightly and slimy at its most basic.

But "you cook it for a long time, puree it and infuse it with truffle oil and it becomes — I don't like the world refined, but let's say 'posh'." His version of Afro-fusion and something that sits very well as a substitute for potato au gratin http://allrecipes.com/recipe/creamy-au-gratin-potatoes/ or a delicate mash with a classic French dish.

]]>wanda@cuisinenoirmag.com (Wanda Hennig)Delicious LifeSat, 31 May 2014 08:34:28 -0700Stirred and Shaken: Traveling the World One Cocktail at a Timehttp://www.cuisinenoirmag.com/delicious-life/stirred-and-shaken-traveling-the-world-one-cocktail-at-a-time
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One of the many beauties of the cocktail is that with all the possibilities, every palate will find many that appeal. Cocktails can be alcoholic — or not. They can knock your socks off, as happened to me when I ordered my first Long Island Iced Tea, sitting in the Sonoma sunshine thinking I was ordering, well, iced tea!

And they can be yet another inspiring vehicle for the culinary traveler. List your favorites then go drink them where they originated. Or be the ultimate innovative armchair traveler listing your favorites and making them for friends at home.

Which leads to another cocktail-inspired word: cosmopolitan. Which in turn brings me to cocktail number one.

The Cosmopolitan — made with three parts vodka (citrus vodka is good), one part Cointreau or Triple Sec, one part fresh lime juice — your choice whether sweetened or not — and two parts cranberry juice. Put the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with lots of ice. Shake well. Strain into a cocktail glass (aka Martini-style) straight up (without ice). Garnish with lime. An American drink, believed to have been created in Ohio and made famous in San Francisco. Any reason is a good reason to visit San Francisco — so why not to drink a Cosmopolitan?

The Stinger — made with one jigger (1.5oz) Old Brandy (a good, aged brandy of your choice, and depending on your taste for brandy, up the recipe to 2oz), one pony (1oz) white Creme de Menthe. Put in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake well. Strain into a cocktail glass. Did you know that Tom Bullock was the first African-American cocktail book author? He wrote The Ideal Bartender, published in 1917. The vintage Stinger, typically an after-dinner drink, is from his collection.

The Obamatini — According to Todd Porter and Diane Cu who invented this cocktail in January 2009 in honor of President Obama’s inauguration, the Obamatini has pineapple juice to give the flavor of Hawaii and chili to mirror the President’s fire. Into an ice-filled cocktail shaker put 3oz pineapple juice, 2oz gin, 3/4oz lime juice, 3/4oz Simple Syrup, quarter to half serrano or Thai chili (crush it inside the shaker), a dash of Angostura. Shake well. Strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a twist of lemon.

Note: Cocktails offer a great chance for invention and playfulness. I remember being asked to a party where everyone was advised to bring a bottle from a selection of liqueurs. The host had about 10 blenders set out. Some people had been told to bring fresh fruit, others ice cream. The evening was a delicious muddle... And starting a dinner party off with tequila slammers on arrival loosens the conversation up fast.

The Caipirinha is Brazil’s national cocktail and there are good reasons to go there to drink it, not least this year’s Soccer World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Made with 1+2/3oz Cachaça, Brazil’s most common distilled alcoholic beverage, which is made from sugarcane, half a lime cut into wedges and 2 teaspoons of brown sugar. Place the lime and sugar into an old fashioned glass and muddle (mash using a muddler or wooden spoon), fill the glass with crushed ice then add the Cachaça (use vodka if you’re stuck).

The Negroni, believed to have been invited in Florence, Italy in 1919 and considered an apéritif (served before a meal), is made of one part (30ml) gin, one part semi-sweet red vermouth and one part bitters, traditionally Campari. Stir into a glass over ice and enjoy. One of the earliest reports of anyone drinking one of these came from Orson Welles when he was working as a journalist in Rome in 1947. To quote, “The bitters are excellent for your liver, the gin is bad for you. They balance each other.”

The Singapore Sling was developed sometime before 1915 by the then-bartender at the Long Bar at Raffles Hotel, Singapore. Don’t be put off from having one if you only have time to breakfast at Raffles, as happened to me the first time I tried a Sling. An original recipe — although apparently it can vary, so Google and experiment — mixes two measures of gin with one of cherry brandy (Heering is good), one of Bénédictine and one of blended pineapple, which creates a foamy top.

Curaçao, the liqueur, is named after the island of Curaçao, part of the Dutch Antilles group in the Caribbean located off the coast of Venezuela. My friend Terry Toohey, the Isle of Man’s Director of Cruise Development, reminded me to include this on my cocktail list.

“Blue Curaçao is most commonly used to make striking cocktails and shooters,” he says. “The blue is absolutely stunning, just what you want a cocktail to look like. The taste has a citrus flavor, derived from the dried peels of the laraha citrus fruit, a descendant of the Valencia orange, grown on the island. The citrus is the reason it’s so refreshing to drink. In my mind, Curaçao is the perfect liqueur to star in a summer cocktail, although I’ll admit I drink it all year around in some fabulous cocktails.” Terry sent us a list of 10 of his favorites. How about the Electric Blue Margarita to combine tastes of Mexico, California and the island of Curaçao. Shake together 1oz Cointreau, 1oz Herradura Silver Tequila, 1/2oz Peach Schnapps, 1/2oz blue Curaçao, 4oz sour mix. Strain over a glass of ice. Garnish with a slice of lemon.

The Mai Tai was featured in the Elvis film “Blue Hawaii’ for readers old enough to remember! And it’s popular in Tiki bars. So it’s a surprise to learn it didn’t originate on some Polynesian island — or in Thailand — but purportedly in Trader Vic’s restaurant in Oakland, California. In a cocktail shaker, with ice, put 8 parts white run, 3 parts orange Curaçao, 3 parts Orgeat syrup, 2 parts fresh lime juice. Strain into a glass and float 4 parts dark rum on the top. Serve with a straw.

The Mojito — my cocktail of choice — is a traditional Cuban highball. Hugely popular, it’s also the closest many have got to Cuba outside of the Buena Vista Social Club. You’ll need 4 parts white rum, 3 parts fresh lime juice, 6 mint leaves, 2 teaspoons sugar and soda water. Muddle the mint leaves, as in bruise them to release the essential oils — don’t shred them — with the sugar and lime juice. Add the rum, top with soda water, garnish with a sprig of mint leaves, serve with a straw in a Collins glass.

The Rhum Chocolate Julep is one of many cocktails synonymous with the Caribbean island of Martinique, famous in the cocktail context for its rum, or rhum, to be inspired by the island’s French flavor. You will need 1 part aged rum, 1 part chocolate liqueur, 5 mint leaves. Muddle the chocolate liqueur and mint leaves in a chilled glass. Fill with crushed iced. Add the aged rhum. Enjoy. Better yet, fly to Martinique and enjoy it there.

Last but not least, explore the International Bartenders Association’s website for great cocktail ideas and recipes. And next time you go traveling, go online to check out what cocktail the destination is famous for — and make sure to try it.

You've picked the date, chosen the dress, the venue and the menu and decided on a great escape for a romantic honeymoon.

Now all you need is to find Mr. Right!

Want to know a secret? Maybe you can, in fact, relate. Many single women start planning their weddings long before there’s a potential hubby on the horizon.

Strange? Who says!

The truth is, according to new research done in the U.K., millions of women have their entire wedding and honeymoon planned. They know what the cake will look like, they have the reception and honeymoon mapped out. They might have a scrapbook or Pinterest page with food and cake ideas and toppers and favorite flower arrangements.

Fact: The average girl, the study found, starts thinking about her wedding when she’s 13 years old — and some as young as age six.

Nearly half of 600 single women polled had settled, around age 18, on who would be their bridesmaids — and started stashing away savings in preparation for the big day.

34 % of single women admitted they regularly browse the web looking for inspiration on flowers, dresses and venues — in the absence having any idea of the identity of the groom.

“If you have attended the weddings of close friends and family it’s hard not to be inspired and start envisioning how you would like your own big day to be,” a spokesperson for the research team says. Additional poll findings include:

1 in 20 single women buy wedding magazines long before they’ve met a potential life partner and nearly 1 in 5 has been to a wedding fair.

58 % said they knew better than to share any of this with a new boyfriend for fear of scaring him off.

27 % said they might drop a few heartfelt hints if they thought it would encourage a guy to pop the question.

13 % of women settle on the month they want to tie the knot before there’s a potential spouse in sight. Nearly one-third reported feeling external pressure to get married, often from eager parents.

49% know exactly what they want to wear with the poll revealing that the dress is the single most planned aspect.

32 % will have a good idea about where she wants to go on honeymoon long before she’s met her match; 20% are clear about a reception venue; and a solid 17% had at least partly planned the menu.

6% with no man in sight, had gone so far as to decide on an exact date.

Now this is all good!

Why?

Law of Attraction says you get what you invest your energy in and focus on!

So long as you’re doing the planning from a place of abundance with a glass-half-full enthusiasm and not from a glass-half-empty place of desperation, my prediction is that you’ll very likely get what you want!

So — you go girl! Set up your vision board, buy a scrapbook or create your Pinterest page and make it happen.

Oh, don’t dismiss online dating. Recent research from Pew tells us that one in ten Americans have used an online dating site or mobile dating app and many people now know someone else who uses online dating or who has found a spouse or long-term partner via online dating. General public attitudes towards online dating have become much more positive in recent years, and social networking sites are now playing a prominent role when it comes to navigating and documenting romantic relationships.

Culinary and Honeymoon Travel Trends for Brides and Grooms in 2014

1) The travel company Kuoni (established in 1906) recently conducted a survey of 2,000 unmarried people and discovered that the perfect honeymoon involves four days of lying in the sun, temperatures of 27ºC, two books, four candle-lit meals, three spa treatments together and three adrenaline-fueled activities. One in ten would even like the thrill of a bungee jump on their romantic getaway.

2) Talking about bungee jumping, experiences are now big when it comes to honeymoons. The same survey revealed that while couples still want the candle-lit meals and Champagne, 32 percent fancied combining this with snorkeling, 31 percent with hiking or trekking and 16 percent would like to go diving with sharks. So, in terms of honeymoons, these days more people than ever before want to return with exciting, unusual or exotic memories.

3) Another interesting trend is that many newlyweds want to share a honeymoon with family and friends. Some friends of mine who chose to wed not so long ago opted for a weekend on the island off Vancouver Island over a jaunt for two to Europe. This was so that friends and family could join them for a whole weekend of partying. It gave one couple time to meet and get to know each other. They subsequently tied the knot themselves. An alternative might be renting a villa in Tuscany — or right in your favorite spot in the US if you don’t want to go flying off.

4) Then there’s glamping (glamorous camping), which can go all the way from a luxury camping experience in Botswana to something much more informal and closer to home where the newlyweds might wake up, fire up the coals, and cook bacon and eggs for friends on their first day of married life followed by a few days sleeping in tipis or yurts.

5) Going nontraditional on venues. Think art galleries, small restaurants, breweries, beach barbecues and bush weddings. Getting to the bush might require a trip to an exotic location but there are many alternative venues that can be trendy, memorable and lighter on the pocket.

6) Food trucks are still in. So are interactive stations, where guests get to mix and match, for example, sliders with a choice of toppings. And the creative barman — aka the mixologist — can entertain guests while creating cocktails perfect for the occasion.

Turin — imposing city of art galleries and opera houses, palaces and museums, restaurants and café culture. A food-focused city where “his excellence the artisan” is promoted via a special logo displayed at more than 900 food purveyors so that visitors can know where to sample from among the city’s many gastronomic traditions and savor the “paradises of taste” — that is, flavors representative of the region.

Italy’s fourth-largest city, capital of the country’s northern Piedmont region, is widely considered the country’s agricultural and viticultural “bread basket” thanks to the fertile Po valley (The Po River flows through Turin).

No surprise that this is where the international Slow Food Movement was born and has its headquarters and that it is home to Slow Food’s biennual Salone del Gusto and Terra Madre, the world’s largest food festival. The five-day event has grown to attract more than 250,000 people passionate about food from around the world —farmers, fishermen, producers, cooks, Slow Food members, foodies — including, in 2012, more than 1,000 small-scale farmers, chefs and artisan producers from 100 countries.

Slow Food advocate and chef Matthew Raiford, center in our picture above, a sixth-generation farmer (he runs Gillard (organic) Farms with his sister, Althea Raiford) in Brunswick, Georgia (his family has owned the land since 1874) was one of the U.S. delegates at the last (2012) Terre Madre/Salone del Gusto and with plans to return for the 2014 Salone del Gusto/Terra Madre this October.

To have a conversation with Raiford is to discover how close the whole family farming and fresh and local farm-to-table concept is to his heart.

Ask him about Southern cuisine and he might tell you that the history of Southern food is more complicated than just “food influenced and cooked by African-American slaves.”

“No one group of people can hold the entirety of Southern food – what everyone was eating depended on the slave labor in the kitchen. It was the native/indigenous people, French, Spanish and West African, among others, that heavily influence Southern food. Many of these foods were created out of seasonality and necessity with readily available spices, vegetables, fresh caught fish and wild game.”

Ask Raiford about agriculture and he is quick to point out that the United States was built via the labor of black farmers — like his ancestors.

“The Africans who were brought to America brought with them a plethora of agricultural knowledge and that knowledge was at the foundation of how early America was able to survive,” he says.

“Without food, no nation will rise and this country’s food system, from rice to sugar, was not only harvested by black farmers, but cultivated using their knowledge of how and when to plant; how much to water and what irrigation system to set up; what the soil was missing; and how much to add of what we now call organic fertilizer (horse, cow, chicken manure). All that was done by black farmers.”

Milestones and events to be celebrated in terms of historic Africa- American contribution to agriculture in America, he says, include:

In 1987, agricultural professor Dr. Booker T. Whatley wrote the handbook, “How to make $100,000 farming 25 acres” that addressed crop diversification, U-Pick farms and creating what he called “Clientele Membership Club” — now known as CSA or Community Supported Agriculture — and all of which have become buzz-words today.

The Italian founder and president of Slow Food, Carlo Petrini, has long pointed out the importance of local communities and family food production. For city dwellers, think urban backyard and rooftop herb and veggie gardens (See Backyard Roots by Lori Eanes) and the “fresh eggs every day” urban chicken trend that’s come home to roost.

Now FAO has endorsed the need to shift from the huge-scale anonymous-production (Who grew your veggies and where? Who knows!) commercial model — back to how things used to be, represented at its best by the Slow Food ideal rooted in local distribution, tradition and the seasons. Farmers markets and Community Supported Agriculture to mention two readily available options for those who don’t want to grow themselves. But why not a pot of kitchen herbs at least?!

It’s good to remember that food is a lot more than a commodity. It’s also about culture, taste and many things linked to our history.

“The core of Terra Madre is the opportunity to come together to share food, culture and knowledge with people from around the globe,” says Jovan Sage, Slow Food USA’s African-American associate director of network engagement.

“For me, this was crystalized in listening to farmers from Kenya in Africa and Georgia in the U.S., talk about the ins and out of growing okra! That gave me a direct experience of the connection of Africa to African-American foodways in the United States.”

We asked Raiford — erstwhile executive chef of haute catering at the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.; Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park alum; University of Georgia culinary arts educator; and one of a small but rapidly expanding contingent of African-Americans taking us back to the lost art of growing food as a way of life — what he thought Cuisine Noir readers might get from heading to Turin and dropping in on Salone del Gusto/Terra Madre 2014.

“I believe the event allows for one to see and participate on the global playing field of food and that this would greatly expand ones appreciation for what is happening in the world, what with pollution, GMO’s and land access and how this is impacting us right now,” he says.

“It also presents an incredible opportunity to see the bio-diversity of food and what other countries are doing to preserve the heritage of food and food cultures — and how we are all in one big giant melting pot of food. It is, I would say, an experience of a lifetime.”

You also, of course, get to eat, to drink, to adventure — and to savor some of the many delights of Turin.

Once upon a time in an earlier life, when I was a workaholic journalist in my 30s — a divorced single mom obsessed with packing so much into each day that I felt allowing myself more than four hours sleep a night was an unnecessary indulgence — as you might expect, I started to burn out.

How did this manifest?

I was often irritable. I didn’t feel good about myself. There came a time when even if a good friend called, it felt burdensome. While I was pretty obsessed with making sure my daughter ate good and healthy fare (and luckily still had a dad living nearby happy to cook and babysit), most of my meals were grabbed on the fly. Caught in what I’ve come to call “busy phobia,” I was unfit, pasty and podgy.

I share this at the start of the new year — a time when so many of us pledge to give up on lifestyles such as what I have just described — as a backdrop to the profound impact that can come about when you go to the right place at the right time; when you’re pushed into a space of reflection and mindfulness; when you’re fed or feed yourself fresh, delicious, wholesome and nurturing food; when you start doing activities that reconnect you with your body.

Because if we’re not in touch with our bodies (impossible when we’re physically rushing and mentally obsessing and stuck in our heads) we can’t monitor stress; we can’t gauge out true hunger (which may, in fact, be for love and connection); we can’t feel our real feelings (which we could be stuffing down and blocking with too much eaten-on-the-fly food); we can’t set intentions around how we want our lives and relationships to be (got to step off the treadmill and out of “habit cycle” to do this).

Welcome to 2014 and may your year be filled with deliciousness!

As a New Year gift, here is a little exercise. You can do it walking, sitting, lying in bed, indoors or outdoors, alone or with people (they might notice you get “quite,” which could well have a calming effect on the company you’re with).

We get to start by feeling the breath as we breathe (which can always, anytime, bring us back to the here and now when our minds have flown off to some problem); then smelling the smells (a good stew simmering; fresh bread baking); then listening to the sounds both external and internal (how popcorn “pops” versus the constant stream of thoughts); then really seeing (the seasonal kaleidoscope of colors at the farmer’s market that changes as the year goes by is a perfect place to look-see); then noting our moods (just notice; no need to do more). Do this little exercise several times a day. You’ll find yourself, without even trying, letting go of stress — at which point, we can begin to rejuvenate and recharge.

Food, Quiet, Meditation, Movement

Returning to my story, I was in serious burnout way back when I went to do a creativity workshop run by a dance therapist at the rural Buddhist Retreat Center in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. You don’t have to be a Buddhist or even interested in Buddhism to go there.

You might, however, immediately find yourself beginning to slow down and unwind. And what I found there are the four essential ingredients that are the standard fare at any place that invites you to unwind, rejuvenate and recharge. It’s good to be aware of them because then one can seek out places to do this that might not advertise themselves as such. Also, you can introduce them into your lifestyle in your own home.

1. Nourishing, delicious food. The Buddhist Retreat Center, like many wellness and spiritual havens, grows herbs and vegetables and serves up delightful and delicious season meals. They are colorful, flavorful, creative and substantial. You eat some of the meals in silence. You eat well. You feel nourished and nurtured. 2. Quiet. There are a lot of silent times. Only in silence can you “hear” yourself. Tap into your intuition and wisdom. 3. Meditation. Essentially this involves following the breath and becoming present. Whereas some people used to run away from the word meditation, research has made it mainstream. It has been shown to have huge physical and mental health benefits. 4. Movement. There are forests to walk through. Paths to wander along. The sounds of nature. We did yoga in the morning outdoors in the sunshine.

My life started transitioning the first time I went there. It was a slow process getting myself off the treadmill of habit and into new ways of being. A quiet vacation, an inner journey, can be both an adventure and a life-changer. And that’s what many of us are after at the start of a new year.

The Top Ten Bucket List

I researched, spoke to people and came up with the following “bucket list” of 10 places to share with Cuisine Noir’s Delicious Life readers. Researching them made me slow down; had me stretching; doing a little yoga; thinking of the farmer’s market and what’s in season.

Let them fuel your imagination. You might put them on your bucket list. You might visit one or two. You might let them inspire you to create your own bucket list of retreat and wellness places in locations you’d like to visit. You might research them and see what they offer so that you can create your own “Do It Yourself” rejuvenation package at home.

Ten Top Delicious Places to Rejuvenate and Recharge: A Bucket List

1. Absolute Sanctuary Thailand At this premier detox and yoga resort on Koh Samui Island, visitors are promised a Moroccan-inspired boutique resort that is “a haven to those seeking a journey back to balance, rejuvenation and a healthy lifestyle.” You get “the pleasures of an island paradise” plus “a life-changing experience” — and The Love Kitchen that offers what looks like sublime vegetarian and non-vegetarian fare.

2. Brookdale Health Hydro South Africa I have many friends who rave about Brookdale, “a haven bordered by forest and farmland with a meandering stream” in the rolling Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal. The focus is escape from the stresses of everyday life. To this end, they offer “a quiet place where physical health and mental well-being can be restored to their balance.” They are well-regarded for their nutritious, delicious menu. See the Brookdale food link for recipes.

3. Esalen California Here, spiritual enlightenment is on the menu along with delicious organic fare inspired by the Esalen garden. Since the ’60s, Big Sur’s Esalen Institute — devoted to the “exploration of human potential” — has attracted seekers, philosophers and others interested in the mind-body connection, the hot springs, the numerous workshops and the gorgeous views. See some favorite Esalen recipes here including an adapted version of malva pudding from Marcus Samuelsson’s recipe in “Soul of a New Cuisine.”

4. Hawaii Island Retreat Big Island, Hawaii You’ll find an eco-boutique hotel and spa and “a place of intentional peacefulness” where you can relax and unwind on 50 acres of gardens, wild groves and ancient valley trails. They grow much of the food used in the hotel kitchen from salad greens to lychee and sunrise papaya and on their organic cuisine menu you’ll find fresh eggs and goat cheese from their retreat farm, as well as seafood fresh from Hawaiian waters.

6. Kalon Surf School Costa Rica Here you are invited to learn to surf “amidst the majestic beauty of Costa Rica’s stunning jungle-bordered beaches.” All levels are welcome to enjoy daily personalized surf coaching, Pilates classes and massages staying in a "boutique style surf hotel" and enjoying fresh food prepared by a private chef. “This retreat is perfect for the active adventurer looking for the balance between exhilaration and relaxation.”

7. Miraval Arizona Mindfulness is at the core of the philosophy of this award-winning spa, reputedly an Oprah favorite. Situated on 400 acres with a Santa Catalina Mountains backdrop, Miraval has built its programming around the concept of life in balance. The menus, featuring healthful locally sourced seasonal ingredients, focus on “textures and flavors that please the palate and respect the waistline.”

8. Parrot Cay Resort Caribbean Go there for yoga and Pilates packages and to achieve balance of mind, body and spirit through Asian-inspired holistic therapies. Parrot Cay is located on one of the most secluded and exclusive resort islands in the northern Caribbean. Enjoy spa packages and seasonal five-star dining from three menus (Terrace, Lotus and Shambala) that “tempts the palate while nourishing the body” with a focus on fresh and local produce — including seafood.

9. Rancho La Puerta Baja California, Mexico Here you’re invited to “renew your mind, body and spirit” in a tranquil setting through “exciting, energetic fitness options, delicious organic cuisine and pure fun and relaxation.” Go for the great escape, one of a series of workshops, the accessibility (not far from San Diego) — stay for (and take home) the culinary experience. Founded in 1940, Rancho La Puerta has an organic farm and La Cocina Que Canta Cooking School. Yum!

10. Retreat Selous Tanzania Now for an eco-lodge and spa that offers extreme luxury and an “authentic” African wildlife and wilderness experience complete with elephants, lions, black rhinos, leopards and more than 400 different birds. They promise visitors “absolute seclusion” and “a journey that blends the soul with nature and untamed wildlife and tailors each day according to individual pace and needs.” You will eat five-star cuisine prepared by a Swiss chef. You can fly via Zanzibar or Dar es Salaam. I would guess that after an extreme adventure such as this, your life will be transformed forever!

Do you celebrate Christmas or Kwanzaa? How are you going to celebrate this year?

Did you know that Christmas and Kwanzaa weddings are trending? And that you don’t have to tie the knot to be inspired by what brides and grooms are putting on the menu.

Has it crossed your mind to add “spice up our love life” to your holiday plans? Did you know that the gastrosexual “man in the kitchen” is a trend that’s getting trendier? Have you thought of paying a festive season visit to Lisbon or South Africa? Or considered including truffles with your Christmas fare?

And what about eating raw food at Christmas? Or spicing up the holiday table with a poetic blend of Baptist and rap traditions? Or infusing some magic into your turkey, duck and chicken to transform it into a wondrous “guaranteed to impress the hell out of everyone” bone-free turducken?

To give you some holiday cheer and inspiration by way of new ideas to incorporate into your celebrations, we checked in with all the Delicious Life stars interviewed during 2013. Here are some of their best, most delicious and enlightening shares.

Delicious Life in 2013 kicked off with ideas for readers set on getting slimmer and healthier. To this end we shared Wisdoms from the Goddess of Raw, Nwenna Kai, author, wellness entrepreneur, food activist, coach, health advocate and Lincoln University adjunct professor.

When we checked in with Nwenna last month, she said the most exciting thing in her life right now is the baby she’s expecting. “My husband and I see it as the best Christmas gift possible seeing that a baby symbolizes transformation, unconditional love and new beginnings — all gifts in themselves.”

Nwenna went on to share Seven tips guaranteed to make this a festive, healthy, and happy holiday season. Take them if you want. Your gift:

Stick to eating healthy as much as possible. Whether the food is raw or cooked, choose fresh food, low-fat, preservative-free. Choose foods with ingredients that you can recognize and pronounce.

Choose to eat in season. Indulge right now in mandarin oranges, persimmons and pomegranates.

Encourage your family to make pumpkin or apple pie fresh from scratch using raw ingredients.

Make festive smoothies with the family. Use frozen cranberries or fresh raw nut milk for a base.

Gather and crack raw fresh nuts around a fireplace with family and friends.

Juice together as a family. Choose your favorite seasonal fruits and vegetables.

Create the best kale salad you can come up with. Make it centerpiece for the family holiday dinner.

Meanwhile, forget the truffle oil. Go get yourself a truffle. According to Napa chef Ken Frank, one of the best ways to showcase the flavor of fresh truffle is with eggs. Whole fresh eggs stored in the refrigerator for 24-48 hours in a tightly sealed jar with a fresh truffle become infused with an incredible amount of truffle perfume. Think deviled eggs with a difference.

Next we looked at Spring Wedding Trendswith special reference to the culinary. Checking back in with our favorite wedding planner, Lisa Smith, she tells us Christmas and to a lesser degree Kwanzaa weddings are trending as more couples plan their nuptials to coincide with a time when family and friends are traveling “back home.”

“The menu for a Kwanzaa wedding is typically soul food with turkey and okra, muhindi (corn, symbolic of children and our future they embody) and mazao fruits, nuts and vegetables, symbolic of African harvest celebrations. Chicken and lamb are also popular.”

Smith says with her family being spread all over the country, “We come together at Christmas to celebrate over an elaborate spread with that includes soul food, Creole and Cajun treats and French and Mexican food selections that reflect our diverse family histories, traditions and background.”

Important at this time of year, she adds, is to remember to incorporate “couple time,” “love time” and special “love foods” to balance holiday stress and keep romance glowing. “During the Christmas season couples are so busy shopping and preparing that they can forget about each other.”

While preparing for the office pot luck, how about preparing a romantic dinner thinking back to that first dinner date? “Or plan to go back to that special restaurant you love.

“And Christmas is a great time to catch stop all that shopping and take in a movie. Be sure to grab a big box of popcorn, hold hands and sneak a kiss.”

Remember, she says, to “slow down, share a nice glass of Champagne and don’t just toast the New Year. Toast and celebrate the love you share all year.”

“Food is the new rock n’ roll in which men express their masculine identity,” he says in a chapter he shared with Cuisine Noir from a book he’s currently writing.”

“The kitchen for the male has become the ‘new battle of the sexes‘— somewhere to be better and to outdo their partner. It is also a place to escape, away from the drudgery of everyday life and the pressure of work. To men, the kitchen is the equivalent of a spa treatment — or somewhere to create a masterpiece,” he has found while doing new research.”

All of which promises that we’ll see more men in the kitchen; more home dining; and more focus on culinary travel because many of the men who become passionate about cooking are inspired by what they eat and learn when they travel abroad.

Talking about gastrosexuals, Oakland Raider’s VoodooMan Michael Lambirth is one. In the summertime he gave us his BBQ sorcery, tips and tricks.

But his true specialty is his holiday turducken — a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck, in turn stuffed into a deboned turkey. You’ve most likely heard of it, even if you haven’t been lucky enough to savor one — or better still, make one.

“When I decided to make one for the family, I looked online to see how to debone the birds and create the dish and you know, it was really pretty easy. There are YouTube videos and good instructions,” says Lambirth.

Different people use different stuffings and the layered poultry can be grilled, roasted, baked or barbecued. The amazing thing is, it comes to the table looking like a turkey — but then you can slice through without ever hitting a bone. Make it your holiday bird this year — or should I say birds?

We broke the silence on the American lamb trendwith what proved another hugely popular column — and lamb is another option to consider when it comes to holiday feasting. American lamb, of course! For inspiration, search around for recipe options, cooking suggestions and videos on the American Lamb website.

Click through to either of the links for truly African inspiration for your holiday table. Meanwhile, know that there will be lots of the local equivalent of barbecuing going on in the southern part of Africa at Christmas time being the summer season.

And hopefully if people cook their turkeys with trimmings, influenced by the country’s Colonial past, the birds will be served cold and with salads.

In Ireland he does like the Irish — with as much singing, laughter and food thanks to the extended family of his Irish wife.

While Irish Christmas dinners traditionally feature a roasted goose, these days a family will typically do baked ham, roast turkey or roast beef; sometimes seafood or chicken; more often than not potatoes in some form and always Irish soda bread.

Raven’s memories of Christmas include his grandmother holding forth with prayer and song. “My grandmother was a Baptist but now, few family members or friends are religious. I still think though, probably because I’m a poet, to mark the occasion with words. You want an emcee or a rapper who can speak like a preacher. You want it to be poetic. You still want the song.”

“I think there’s a lot one can do to create new and appropriate traditions based on the old. I think it’s something I want to do. I think it’s a very good idea.”

However you celebrate the holidays, Christmas, the festive season, Kwanzaa — and whatever new traditions you create or incorporate — Delicious Life wishes you good times.

San Francisco-born performance poet Raven has fond memories of Thanksgivings and Christmases with his family — well before he married, moved to Dublin, Ireland and started making new memories.

“At any family gathering in the Bay Area there was always ‘the spoken word,’ food and libations. My folks weren’t religious but my grandparents on both sides were Baptist. My grandmother was the church organist. I cannot separate my family gatherings from people testifying; food, drink and words of some kind, be their speeches or songs, are all part of the Black American ceremonial way.

“My grandmother was really eloquent with her words. She didn’t stick to established prayers. When I did hip-hop, I was into free-styling and my grandmother sort of did it that way. She was an eloquent speaker and would ‘rip’ off the top of her head before meals, then lead the singing afterward.

“I found something similar when I moved to Ireland. My wife’s family is Scottish and Irish and Catholic. She has a big boisterous extended family, like mine. I’ve felt very comfortable with the way they do things. I wouldn’t say I’ve taken them any of my traditions. They had their own and I’ve embraced theirs.”

“The typical celebratory meal of Raven’s youth and pre-Ireland adulthood was gumbo. “My family’s roots were in South Texas and New Orleans where a lot of gumbo was eaten. Gumbo is a wonderful celebratory food because of all it brings together. My wife is vegetarian — and no, as I told her, vegetarian gumbo would not work!”

“Ultimately with gumbo there are the people around the table sharing it, but even in the making of it, there’s a sharing. A bit of this and a bit of that. You use whatever you can lay your hands on. Shrimp, crab, sausage, the veggies, rice, grains. If someone has something they can bring to throw into it, that’s great. People can contribute. This is part of what makes it special.”

The Poetry of Gumbo

“And you can’t rush gumbo. It takes time and attention. It’s the same simmering process as making a soup — or writing a poem.”

And, he says, “Writing a poem is like creating a recipe and cooking. I probably write about three poems a year that I would consider worthy of presenting to the public.

“And I’m a really slow cook too!”

“My wife (a psychologist) improvises and cooks quickly. She throws things together and what she comes up with is good.

“I’m pretty good at improvising, but it takes me a long time. It’s like my writing process.

“She doesn’t taste when she’s cooking. I taste.

“And I let things cook for a good long time. Like a soup. Soup is one of those things that’s better if you let it cook for a good long time. With my poetry, I will let ideas and concepts and snippets sit. I keep the ingredients — these snippets, phrases, ideas, concept, on my phone.

“Then at some point, when I set about writing the poem, I go through them all, looking at the word clips, the couplets and all the rest. It’s like going through a larder. I start pulling out words and ideas and phrases I’ve compiled and putting them on the page. Then I start shifting them around; adding; taking away. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Looking for what’s needed for the full flavor.”

When I meet him, Raven is — ravenous. He has traveled from Ireland to present at the 2013 Poetry Africa festival in Durban, South Africa. He and other poets I crossed paths with at their beachfront hotel headquarters are recovering from what I am told have been a series of late-night alcohol-fueled formal and informal debates, discussions and partying. A huge breakfast is the remedy.

Raven likes his food; talking about it, cooking it, relishing it. “I have a voracious appetite,” he says, his plate piled high. “I eat off other people’s dinner plates and I eat other people’s leftovers. I lick plates in restaurants. I really do! My wife was shocked at first but I have no pride. If I paid for it and I’m enjoying it, why am I going to leave it?”

Talking about Raven

His name, he says, is one he assumed. “It came to me.” He shares the “short version” of the story.

“I had a period in my life when things were extremely chaotic; deaths in the family, a relative sent to prison for murder, my daughter being born. During this time I had a series of dreams, of ravens coming to me, talking to me. At the same time in San Francisco, the population of ravens was growing. So there were ravens in my dreams and in my life.

“My given surname, I didn’t relate to. It related to some family who had owned my family during slavery. The names were handed down by slave masters for the most part. My first name I didn’t feel belonged to me but to my grandfather. The birds were talking to me. I felt an affinity mythologically and with what I heard. So Raven became my name.” He had it legally changed almost a quarter of a century ago and doesn’t have a surname.

“People have a thing, that your ‘real’ name is something someone gives you. Be it the slave owners or parents, I dismiss the idea.”

But he values the cadence, language and lyricism of the spoken word. “You can hear the lyricality when you listen to a Baptist teacher or a good rapper.”

He notes that there is musicality in the spoken word. “Living in Dublin, when I’m walking down the streets, I hear poetry and lyricality in the voices of people speaking Polish and Lithuanian and African languages.”

And on one level, it’s all connected. The people and the poetry. The inside and the outside. The eating and the speaking.

The Poetics of Food

“There’s a lot of poetry about food,” he says. “Shel Silverstein wrote a lot of whimsical poetry, including a very funny poem about Italian food. Some people think his poetry is for children but it’s for adults as well.”

“I have a poem called Pomegranate. See Raven share Pomegranate on You Tube. I am fascinated with what seems like a single fruit but then you open it up to its core and you have complexity, the spilling of the seeds. The poem is based on the idea the pomegranate was the fruit on the tree of knowledge, not an apple.”

For black people in the U.S., he adds, “There’s a lot of pride and identity wrapped up in both how we use language and the foods we eat. A lot of the traditional foods have their roots in what we could afford; what we were given. Chitlins, for example. And pigs trotters and oxtail soup. These were all made out of odds and ends that sharecroppers would have got. Part of Black Power was getting back to eating soul food.

And back to language, his medium as poet: “How we speak can be considered ‘not black enough.’ I faced a degree of this because of how I was educated and my dialect and the words I use change dramatically depending on who I’m talking to.”

Food and words. Words and celebrations. Celebrations and traditions.

“We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Ireland. Apparently there is a group of ex-pats in Dublin who do. I’ve been meaning to connect with them. I have political issues with the reason Thanksgiving is celebrated. But I did celebrate it, as it was a change to get together with family and eat good food. Thanksgiving and Christmas — they were always good. Thanksgiving was always also a nice dry run for Christmas but you didn’t have go buy anyone anything.

Address to a Haggis

Raven hasn’t done Thanksgiving in Ireland, but “My wife and I have made a tradition of doing a Burns supper every year. Robbie Burns’ (1787 poem) Address to a Haggis must be one of the most famous food poems. He was an extremely funny poet. We have the whole haggis ceremony. We invite a bunch of friends over and recite the poem when we bring out the haggis.

“None of this would have happened had I not married an Irish woman. Or the hangover the next morning when I’m having leftover haggis, eggs and a shot of whisky,” he chuckles.

“My wife wrote an ‘Ode to a vegetarian haggis’ using Burns’ language and his style. Now you’re making me want to write ‘Ode to gumbo’!”

Let me start with a disclaimer. You probably know a few Francophiles, those weird and wonderful people magnificently obsessed by France who don’t have a drop of French juice running through their veins other than what they swill down when they pull the cork (or twist the screw top) on a tasty Rhône-style red.

Well, I’m a Durbanophile.

My bias and what distinguishes me from your average Francophile — beyond the obvious geographic and cultural considerations — is rooted in the fact that I was born and bred in Durban. Since I made the San Francisco Bay Area my home-from-home and became an Oaklandophile (you can’t cuckold a city so I reckon it’s OK to spread the love), I’m happy to admit that I’ve been compulsively pulled back over and over again.

My Durbanophile tendencies manifest when I meet people in the United States who have been to South Africa, most likely switched planes in Johannesburg, then restricted their city adventures to Cape Town.

And yes, Cape Town is the country’s most scenic city with its iconic Table Mountain backdrop and easy access to Africa’s most famous wine region.

But I think of Cape Town as Europe-wannabe with its chichi restaurants, bakeries and coffee shops, its upscale touristy waterfront and its profusion of galleries and kultcha.

By comparison Durbs-by-the-sea, as it’s familiarly known, is uniquely African. The term “melting pot” might well have been coined for this sprawling sub-tropical Indian Ocean port — and resort — city with its British colonial roots, where first and third worlds intersect and where Zulu (Durban is the biggest city in the Zulu-stronghold province of KwaZulu-Natal), Indian and European cultures collide, dissect and blend.

Bovine Coffee Klatch

So, for example, the traditional Zulu version of the “coffee” klatch has women paring bloodied flesh from the skulls of decapitated cows, boiling the carved-off chunks of facial meat and serving it on wooden boards along with dumplings — steamed hand-rolled balls of flour, water and yeast — to men who lounge on plastic chairs and wonky wooden benches sipping tea from enamel mugs, chatting animatedly and using their hands to eat the meat.

“Those dumplings are the food of the Gods,” says Thabo Zulu.

He is our guide at the Bovine Head Market, a refuge in the frenzy that defines Warwick Junction, site of nine markets (book a tour via Markets of Warwick on the edge of inner-city Durban that support huge creative entrepreneurship. Around 460,000 commuters a day come and go from this hub. About 6,000 street vendors and up to 8,000 market vendors support themselves by selling everything from apples and oranges to beads, live chickens for rituals and the pot, tailoring skills, spices and medicinal “muti” herbs and much more.

When I toured, Zulu (our guide) encouraged our group of about a dozen people, from the U.S., Sweden, Germany and other parts of Africa, to sample the boiled meat and dumplings sprinkled with salt — old fashioned and iodized, not Hawaiian or designer or artisanal — poured from a plastic Cerebos container.

While the fare is palatable, it’s unlikely to have you scrambling for seconds.

But the good news is, there’s a veritable feast of compelling reasons — many comfortingly less “exotic” and including a vibrant “conventional” local restaurant scene — to visit what many South Africans will tell you is their favorite vacation city.

Heritage tour options offer access to both historic and lifestyle “happenings” like the Bovine Head Market and shisa nyama (“hot meat”) feasts at township taverns , where butchers’ cuts of your choice are grilled barbecue-style over open fires. Enjoy with local beer such as Carling Black Label or Castle Lager.

Dynamic, Delicious Durban

But Durban, with its hot, humid summers and mild to warm winters, it’s lush greenness, bustling African-city downtown, philharmonic orchestra, upscale shopping malls (know that Gateway has become restaurant central if you visit), art deco beachfront casino (more restaurants), acclaimed Durban International Film Festival and access to “big-five” game reserves like Hluhluwe–iMfolozi, the oldest proclaimed wildlife preserve in Africa with the largest population of white rhino in the world, has a lot more to offer.

I most recently returned to Durban just two short weeks ago. To stay with coffee klatches and the food I can tell you that, same as Oakland, each time I come back I find myself both reacquainting with old favorites and stumbling upon a lot that’s new.

Pop-up food markets abound and the city has a good selection of restaurants serving sustainable, seasonal, creative cuisine.

About 15 minutes north of Durban is the resort “suburb” of Umhlanga, which brims with restaurants and is home to The Oyster Box, a destination hotel with sublime sea views that originally opened in 1947 and recently was given a state-of-the-art face-lift. Enjoy tongue-in-cheek colonial splendor, a delightful collection of original art and several restaurants and bars that while pricy, are worth it for the style, the charm and to experience this gem. If you visit, it’s worth exploring the Umhlanga food scene. A bunch of top restaurants have relocated there. Chef Themba Mngoma, who we featured in Cuisine Noir in July 2012 (Hot tips For At-Home Summer Entertaining from a South African Warrior Chef), has recently taken over as executive chef at Little Havana.

The city’s single largest population group is the descendants of the Indians from India who came as indentured laborers to work on the sugar plantations more than 100 years ago. Mosques and temples plus spices and curries are among the rich legacy — and bunny chow, originally a cheap meal for laborers comprising half a loaf of white bread, the inside scooped out, bean curry spooned into the bread “bowl” and the inside put back to mop it. Bunny chow now comes in many “designer” forms.

For Colonial Portuguese, a unique cuisine that had its roots in Mozambique, check out North Beach’s unpretentious Neo Café. I had a “half a peri-peri chicken; half calamari” experience there last week. An erstwhile Durban university buddy, visiting from Scotland, had the peri-peri queen prawns. We both vowed we’d be back soonest.

Life’s a Beach

For the record, Durban’s best attribute by far is its beachfront.

In fact there are several beaches, strung together, running past the iconic Moses Mabhida Stadium with its distinctive arch and skycar for city-viewing, built for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. The beachfront with its pedestrian walkway, great for strolling or cycling, continues all the way to the harbor entrance.

The beachfront is a hang-out for surfers, kayakers, stand-up paddlers, swimmers, strollers, runners, sun-worshippers, seine-net fishermen and usually at the weekend, robed African priests who arrive early to conduct services that usually involve dunking the faithful — perhaps to exorcise some irksome ancestral spirit.

The swimming beaches are protected by shark nets and tourist attractions include booking a seat on the KwaZulu-Natal Shark’s Board viewing boat. You get to watch the nets get serviced and enjoy great views of dolphins, the city and the sunrise.

For the best beachfront coffee and brekker go to Jiran or Circus Circus at North Beach. Anytime after 10 am head for Moyo-on-the-Pier at uShaka Beach for a beer with a view. Check out uSharka Marine World where you’ll find the city’s aquarium and dolphinarium.

See you in Durbs sometime, happy travels getting here — and if you’re coming, know that South African Airways flies daily from New York and from Washington to Durban via a brief stopover and plane change in Johannesburg.